A/N: Last chapter for this arc! Make sure you've read 29 and 30 if you haven't already. I always get nervous when I update irregular to my schedules. While I'm happy to say that I've written all the way up to Chapter 34, and hope to work on 35 soon, I'm probably going to set my sights on writing HC. It's been laying dormant for too long, gotta break that sleeping curse.

Zain and Cha0T1cPeace, I thoroughly enjoyed your Chitose rants! And I'm glad you liked the Naoi/Kanade run-in as much as I did. I like your ideas on Chitose - trust me when I say you haven't seen the last of her! I would almost call her the cryptid of this series; she'll pop up once in a while so readers can get to know her. Also, this chapter should explain the Yuri/Chitose thing a little more.

Posting this now so I can get ready to go visit my siblings. Enjoy!

[Chapter 31]: Eternities Still Unsaid

After they'd pulled apart, Yuri had felt very aware that she'd had a fight and a breakdown in the middle of a hallway.

"Can we go somewhere?" she'd asked quietly, abashed as she sniffled through a nervous laugh. "I don't want to be here, but I don't want to go home either."

Ayato had thought for a second, then said, "I know a place."

They snuck out through a side door, cut across campus, and went on their usual trek through town. But when they reached their first turning point, he led her in a different direction into the forest. He'd particularly enjoyed the growing realization in her eyes when they took to the left trail.

Now they were standing on the bridge, both draped against the handrail and gazing out over the steady river. More than half-skeletal trees and a sunless sky looming over them.

"I'm sorry," he said, and she side-eyed him curiously. "For… acting like a brat that day, and getting so intrusive. I shouldn't have been so demanding of you."

With a frown, Yuri turned back to the water. "You weren't wrong. I was being a dodgy bitch."

He winced. He had said that, hadn't he? The words sounded so cruel echoed back to him from her mouth.

"Masuda was right. I should have just told you."

"Why didn't you?" he asked, furrowing his eyebrows at her. "I already know what happened with your family."

"Dunno." Her lips curved upward into a wry half-grin, her voice quiet and reflective. "I guess I didn't want you to know what a horrible friend I am."

"Don't say that."

For a moment, silence settled between them – filled only by flowing water and a mild gust of wind that rattled the trees. A few colorful leaves landed in the river and gently floated downstream. Then Yuri sighed, closing her eyes for a minute before casting him a soft glance. "How much did you hear, anyway?"

He considered his words, thinking back to his hiding place by the stairs.

"All of it, to be honest," he said vaguely.

Yuri nodded. "Then you have a general idea of what happened."

"I heard her side of it," he countered. For the most part, Yuri had been strikingly close-mouthed as Hisakawa had lambasted her in the hallway. He thought of Masuda, and added, "I want to know yours."

She lowered her eyes to the water again, absentmindedly stroking the rail with a thumb. "It's stupid, really."

In that moment, he was almost positive that it wasn't.

"We were best friends," she said, which he'd already gathered. "From primary all the way up till high school. I used to tell Shion and Ajisai she was the other sister we were always meant to have." She tried at a feeble laugh then, shaking her head at her past self. "Terrible thing to say, when you think about it. Like they weren't good enough."

"Didn't they like her too?" he asked, musing. Although he could understand them wanting Yuri all to themselves, they might've enjoyed having two cool big sisters watching over them.

"Yeah, they did." Yuri pursed her lips into a small line, neither a smile nor a frown. Just… reflection. "When our parents were away and I was too young to babysit, her family would look after us sometimes. She had a bunch of aunts and uncles and grown up cousins who visited a lot, so five kids in one house was nothing to them." She sounded sort of wistful as she described it. "And we'd all play together. But then Hisakawa and I would let them play with her sister Satomi while we went off and did our own thing. You know, go off on our big kid adventures? Sometimes I wonder if they ever felt left out."

Ayato frowned at this. "You'd never mean to."

"But I did, didn't I?" she said softly, more to herself than him. "I joined gymnastics, made friends with the whole team. We were inseparable. They'd even come over when I was babysitting. I think that made my siblings happy. If our parents weren't home, I was guaranteed to be, and they'd have this… this parade of big kids cartwheeling around and watching TV with them."

She laughed then, and he laughed with her. It was a cute mental picture; personally he considered her siblings very lucky.

"Chitose even—" Yuri paused her laughter, furrowing her brows when she caught herself. "Well, my mom's pretty good at web design and computer science. So she taught us coding when we were twelve, and Hisakawa thought it was really cool so we designed these crappy websites for them. Saki would record Ajisai singing something and upload it… it was so cute. Her voice…"

Yuri's words faltered with a crack and a sharp, watery breath. Ayato glanced at her in alarm.

"If it's too much…" he said, not keen on hearing her cry again.

Yuri shook her head.

"No, I'm okay." She sniffled quietly, and wiped at her cheek with the back of her hand. "You know… the last thing I ever heard her sing was a birthday message to Hisakawa. Over the phone."

She stopped again, and rubbed at her temples with two fingers. Silently he wondered if it wasn't a discreet attempt at wiping away more tears.

"It's so messed up," she murmured. "We were supposed to be visiting my grandparents – they didn't have time to see us very much, but when they did, they loved to spoil us. But all I could think was that it meant they could babysit and I could go to that stupid party."

Petulantly, she kicked the schoolbag at her feet. He didn't have the heart to tell her it was his.

"And they let me," she sniffed. "They knew I was being selfish and they let me."

He said nothing, only waited for her to continue. Yet he narrowed his eyes in thought. It sounded to him like they had loved her enough to let her go have fun with a friend.

Maybe he didn't know as much about family as she did. Or even grandparents. His dad's father had died of a heart attack months before Ayato was born, his mother following only two years later. His only living grandparent, his maternal grandmother, was too old (and scared of Kimito) to do more than call. He didn't exactly know what grandparents were supposed to do or not do. But certainly, it seemed reasonable that they might let kids be kids.

If she'd noticed his skepticism, she was too deep in her own mind to notice.

"If I'd stayed with my siblings," she clutched the railing to steady herself, "if I'd skipped the party and hung out with my family… they wouldn't have gone." She gazed out towards the trees with a pained look etched into her features. "They knew they were bad at driving in the winter. They knew it was going to snow. But they wanted to take Shion and Ajisai to dinner anyway – to cheer them up after I'd ditched them."

She closed her eyes as shame turned to resigned anguish. A brisk November wind nipped at their hair, and she hugged herself tightly at the cold.

"The police said there was a lot of black ice and they lost control. Another car drove straight into their side and knocked them off the side of the road. Upside down in a snowy ditch."

Her voice sounded chilled, like she was right back there with them. She was in that white room again – the one he sometimes pictured when she got lost in her memories like this. Only it seemed to him now as though the room was whiter than he imagined. He didn't want her trapped with them; at this point he almost wanted to shake her out of it.

"It was a while before anyone stopped to help, but it wouldn't have mattered." Finally her eyes opened again, she cast the water a bitter smile. "And meanwhile, I'm at Chitose's, painting toenails and braiding Saki's hair."

Ayato had seen car wrecks like that before, on TV and in dark corners of video-sharing websites. They got particularly bad in winter. Some cars skidding on ice into the wrong lane just in time to get annihilated by a truck. Others making too sharp of a turn and reaping the consequences. At the time he watched them, they'd been riveting. But now he thought of Shion and Ajisai, eyes wide with terror as they noticed the other car. Small bodies being thrashed around like little dolls as the car tumbled, or already crushed by the impact. Who could know?

He had been there with his brother when he died. He knew exactly how he went. He had hit his head on the rock and gone fast, no suffering. Yuri couldn't say the same. She had not gone with them. She had partied with a friend.

But… all possibilities considered, was that such an unforgivable sin?

"You couldn't have known," he argued. She'd said it herself, they shouldn't have been on the road. "Your grandparents could've made them dinner at home, watched movies, let them stay up late and sleep in a pillow fort. You didn't make them do anything."

"I chose my friends over them," Yuri said, stubbornly despondent. "The last thing I ever did as a big sister was abandon them."

He took in her words with a furrowed forehead. Hisakawa's rants from before resurfaced and began to eat away at his brain. If Yuri hadn't gone to the party, wasn't it possible her grandparents would've wanted to spoil her too? Perhaps a treat to make up for missing her best friend's birthday for them? What if…

Shaking away the thought, his hand drifted uncertainly to Yuri's wrist.

"You don't…" he paused, and swallowed nervously before continuing the thought, "you don't really wish you'd been in that car, do you?"

Yuri looked up at him, surprised, before her expression softened into one of reassurance.

"No," she said. Her conviction relaxed him, and yet there was still some unnerving hesitation in her voice as she went on. "For a while, I… I thought I should have been. I just… wish I'd never gone to that party. I wish it'd been moved to any other day. Or that she never invited me at all. I wish I'd appreciated my family more while I still had one."

"I see." He moved his hand away, thinking.

But in a way, he didn't see. Or, he couldn't understand how she couldn't. It amazed him really. Here he was, thinking she felt invincible in all regards, when her strongest feature was the one she underestimated the most. If she was anything like what he'd seen in pictures, and even onstage today, it was hard to believe she'd ever been anything less than a devoted big sister.

"So you blame yourself," he noted. "And Hisakawa too."

Yuri sighed.

"I don't know how to explain it," she admitted, turning around and leaning against the railing. "I was fourteen; it was a dramatic time for me. The rest of our friends gave me some space for a while, but Hisakawa…" She closed her eyes again, scrunching up her face as if glowering into the past. "Ugh, it was just the way she handled it..."

"What'd she do?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at her. Though after today's debacle, he had a general idea.

"She… ugh." Yuri curved her lips into yet another grimace, folding her arms tightly across her chest. "You'd have to know her. She's got this complex, this… horrendously idealistic view of the world."

Ayato was suddenly reminded of that day in the shop, that grand speech of hers, and gave a sympathetic cringe.

"She's always like, Oh, life is an adventure! Roll with the punches! Let's enjoy it!" Yuri continued, throwing her arms out exaggeratedly. An eerily spot-on impression of her old friend. She gave a rich, derisive snort. "Not exactly what you want to hear after you've actually gone through pain. I wanted to tell her: shut up, easy for you to say, but life sucks. The world is cruel – leave me the fuck alone."

A snicker of complete understanding slipped through his teeth, and he grinned at her in an attempt to lighten the mood. "So she was like your Hejjiguchi."

"Pretty close," she agreed, leaning back on both propped elbows. "She likes school, she finds fulfillment everywhere, she still has her little sister. I just… I couldn't deal with her.

"She cornered me after a few weeks of avoiding her, going off on one of her concerned rants about how I needed to rejoin the living world. And I just… snapped." Her eyes flew open as the wind jostled some stubborn leaves off the branches. "Told her it was partially her fault I hadn't been there for my family, and I didn't want to hear any more of her 'stop being sad and start loving life with me again' crap."

She rolled her eyes.

"We fought, she claimed she saved my life—" she paused to jab a fist in the air—"I punched her in the face."

Ayato smirked. Truth be told, he liked the mental image.

"I suppose you two stopped being friends after that," he said drolly.

Yuri just shrugged.

"I stopped being friends with everyone after that." She looked reminiscent again, staring off through the trees at a neighborhood in the far distance. "Dropped out of gymnastics, ate lunch on the roof, only ever really talked to people in my class."

"For… two, almost three years?" he guessed, remembering what Hisakawa had said and piquing his eyebrows at her. "Why?"

"I'd pretty much convinced myself I didn't deserve friends after I'd put them above my own blood." Her gaze dropped to her shoes, which scuffed at the wood. "Besides, I doubted anyone would really understand what I was going through." She looked up again – this time at him. Eyes soft and unsure. "Until I met you."

He stared back at her in surprise, turning to her and likely doing a bad job of hiding the affection that had stirred in his chest.

"N… Ayato… I'm so sorry," Yuri said, with a sincerity that tugged him too close as she touched his hand. "I pushed you away too. And I got so invested in the drama club mission that I—"

"No," he stopped her, squeezing her hand, "you were having fun. You were… making friends again. I shouldn't have made it about me."

"But you're my best friend!" she insisted. "You're…"

She trailed off, averting her eyes sheepishly to the river below.

"I should've been able to tell you everything." Her voice was quieter now, laced with a rueful shame he wished he'd never put upon her. "It was just… a part of my life I didn't want to think about. I wanted to keep you separate from that life. If that makes sense."

"I understand," Ayato said almost immediately. "Like with you and my father."

Yuri regarded him for a moment, mulling over the analogy. Then she flushed and winced sheepishly again. "And I was pushy about that, wasn't I…"

He shook his head. "It's fine—"

"It's not. I'm such a hypocrite," Yuri said, laughing to herself. "You just wanted to know what was bothering me. But with your dad… I just wanted to spend more time with you."

Ayato felt like an imbecile. A guilty, selfish, narcissistic imbecile. "I'm sorry I ever thought otherwise."

Yuri looked guilty too. She sighed and turned back to the river.

They ruminated in silence for a couple of minutes. He watched her pick up some spare stones and bark and toss them at the water. Her throwing arm wasn't too bad; the stones made some distance. He wondered if she ever taught her siblings to do that.

She must've spent a lot of time with them after all. Despite what she'd said. They were very dear to her heart, or else she wouldn't mourn them so strongly as to forsake everyone else. In all honesty, he pitied Hisakawa in a way. These past three weeks had been awful; he couldn't imagine going three years without her. It would be hard to see her anywhere, without…

His eyes opened in realization.

"So when people stared at us in the hall," he said carefully, rubbing at his neck, "…they were looking at you?"

Yuri blinked, dropping the last stone into the water with a tiny plop.

"Probably," she reasoned. "After everything, I always walked alone. Things are different now – makes sense that people might've noticed." Then, she tilted her head at him. "You thought they were staring at you?"

"I thought I was the problem," Ayato told her. She raised an eyebrow. "People would notice you, look like they wanted to say something, hesitate and walk away." Realization hit him the more he explained, and he snorted at himself. "I thought I was scaring them off."

Yuri laughed too. "That's what that was?"

Ayato grinned at her. "Maybe it's a good thing. I scared off Hisakawa for you."

"Thanks for that," she said with a smile. "But I doubt she's afraid of you. She's the 'I'm leaving because I want to' type." She fixed him with an inspecting stare. "Besides, didn't the two of you have a certain friendly chat last month? Ami says you two had lunch together."

Her tone was so transparent that he had trouble stifling a smirk. Coyly, he reassured her, "Don't be jealous. She came by my classroom to drop off something of Hejjiguchi's." He wrinkled his nose for good measure. "All we talked about was stress dreams and her dead fish."

Unexpectedly, Yuri gave a small gasp.

"Was it Mamoru?" she asked, astonishment taking over her face. "That grumpy old beast finally went belly-up?"

"You knew him?"

"She had him since she was a baby, or so she says," Yuri told him matter-of-factly, but gave a dubious shake of her head. "I swear those things aren't supposed to live that long. The bastard used to bite my finger – probably had fish dentures or something."

"A feud so powerful you hate the girl's pets," Ayato said, impressed.

She frowned, crossing her arms again. "Well, now you've made me feel bad. She grew up with the damn thing. We'd go upstairs to get on her computer and Mamoru would be there in his king-sized aquarium just staring and blowing kisses at me. That's what she called it at least." Mockingly, she dialed her voice up to a shrill giddy wail. "Oh, Mamoru, you're such a flirt!"

He snickered at her impression, albeit a little perturbed. "Aren't people usually a cat or dog person?"

"Don't even get me started," Yuri said, raising a hand to halt him. But she snickered too, muscles in her jaw visibly relaxing. "She's always been that strange. When we were younger, we used to do the most ridiculous stuff. Climb onto roofs, scale buildings, explore tunnels and caves or other tight-squeeze places. Sometimes she'd have us bring tools, like spades or shovels, and I'd say, 'Oh, we're digging for treasure?' and she'd say, 'Sure' but then, 'oh, there was a cave-in! We need to rescue this person!' And I'd be like, 'Oh, okay' because that was really cool and more intense than treasure hunting.

"But she did that sort of thing a lot when we played together," Yuri recalled. "She'd want to act out scenes where we were on high places and she would save me or one of our other friends from falling or something."

Ayato considered all of this, and pursed his lips.

"That would explain the big deal she made about saving you from the crash," he said thoughtfully. "I take it she has a hero complex."

"You bet," she confirmed, then kicked at the wooden railing for no clear reason. "After all the years of her parents telling her she could be or do whatever she wanted, she thinks she's invincible. She even had a superhero cape as a kid. I'm not exaggerating."

She laughed then, probably thinking of Hisakawa in a cape. As he was doing right now – although he found it much funnier that Yuri of all people would have something to say about perceived invincibility.

"I think it made her mad that she couldn't drag me out of my 'funk,'" she said, absently watching some leaves tumble into the river. "Like saving people, the act of rescue, is more important for her than it is for them."

"I do remember her telling me don't dwell on it too much." He harrumphed a little at the memory. It hadn't bothered him that much then, but knowing what he knew, it did now. He regarded Yuri musingly, letting all she'd told him soak in. "Sometimes, people need to dwell. You could push a baby bird out of the nest before it's ready, but the consequences won't be pleasant."

"Hmm." Yuri made a small sound of agreement, meeting his gaze. "She doesn't understand limitations like you do."

Ayato shot her a questioning scoff. "Thanks?"

She laughed. "I meant it in a good way."

"Even so…" He turned to her, chancing a small smile. "I'm glad you left the nest."

Yuri gave him a soft look, the budding smile on her lips standing in for whatever words she did or didn't have. A comfortable silence settled in as they watched little red and orange leaves sail like little boats over the rocks in the stream.

It didn't last long. Maybe a minute or so later, Yuri straightened up as if she'd just thought of something.

"Your turn," she said.

"What?"

"I had to pour my heart out just now." Yuri drummed her fingers on the wooden railing. "We haven't done that in a while, as you pointed out during our fight. So… now you have to tell me something about your past."

He pinched his forehead at her in confusion. "What do you—"

She interrupted, "Why don't you tell me about Hayato?"

Again, she'd caught him off-guard. He turned to her, bracing his hip against the rail and crossing his arms. "You already know everything."

"I know he died, and I know your parents still miss him," said Yuri, leaning on her elbow and resting her chin on her fist. "But I don't know how you feel. You mention him in passing, like he's some neighbor who moved away. But he was your twin brother. This whole other Naoi."

He must've made some sort of stunned face, because for a second she lost some of her reserve.

"My dad doesn't like to talk about his brother either," she said, oddly demure in her tone. "I just thought…"

"What happened to your dad's brother?" Ayato asked, interested. This was the first he'd heard of her parents' siblings.

"Even I don't know that," she said with a shrug, then pointed an accusing finger at him. "But don't change the subject. Don't identical twins have a deep, unshakable emotional bond?"

"I suppose so." Ayato rubbed his chin, trying to think back more than six years. He wouldn't go right to unshakable.

Yuri was looking at him expectantly, so he tried a little harder.

"I guess you could say he was my first best friend, and my first rival," he conceded. That was the best way to put it; somehow they could be both at once. "We were always fighting for our father's attention – but come to think of it, I liked his attention better. Getting scolded by Kimito was no fun. Sitting in my room alone with nothing but books and handheld games… I could take it or leave it."

He glanced down the bridge at the dirt road, the trees, the grassy ups and downs covered in blankets of leaves.

"But when training was over and done with," he gestured around at everything, "my brother and I used to play in these woods."

"What was he like?"

"An idiot," Ayato replied automatically, and Yuri laughed in surprise. "Seriously, the only reason I wasn't the one bossing him around was because he was the older twin and I didn't know any better. He was probably a good potter because his brain was made out of modeling clay," he added scornfully. "Kimito could make him into whatever he wanted."

But he paused, taking in his surroundings, and felt a guilty twinge in his heart. As easy as it was to joke with Yuri about this, it felt wrong to speak ill of the dead. Particularly of Hayato, in this very forest. It was the playground he'd lived and died on.

"He'd be so focused during training," he amended, "but outside of the workshop he was a completely different person." Grinning as his eyes fell on a tall tree and a memory came to him, he added, "The type of person who, if he caught you running toward something, would zoom up behind you, run as hard as he could, and slap whatever it was in triumph before you could get to it."

"Shion used to do that!" Yuri said, laughing with a bright-eyed nostalgic joy. "Ajisai would always get so mad at him."

"Brothers, right? Everything is always a competition with us," Ayato said proudly, glad he'd brought a happy memory to her mind. Then he rolled his eyes and grinned halfheartedly. "But… looking back, it was kind of funny. I would be so lazy if it weren't for him. He was a big nature lover. The only reason I learned to climb trees was because he knew how to do it."

He looked out at the woods, at the swaying and snapped and overturned branches.

"I still like walking through forests even now," he said as an afterthought. "It's where we were always the most free."

Yuri nodded, worrying her lip as her green eyes scanned the trees. She looked as if she were trying to picture a younger version of him, shimmying up the trunk and fooling around like one of those schoolyard idiots.

"Do you miss him, then?" she asked, smoothing a wind-mussed lock of hair behind her ear.

"Yeah," he said, after giving it some thought. "I miss having a brother."

It felt strange to say. Was this… the first time he'd outright admitted it? That made sense; he couldn't think of anyone else who might've bothered to ask. The thought slipped through the corridors of his mind from time to time, but he'd never said it. Never… never really confronted it. He'd been too busy trying to please Kimito, to make up for his absence, to hold on to himself.

He stared up at the treetops, catching glimpses of grey sky.

"Sometimes… it feels like I've stolen his identity." A flicker of a dream came to mind: of a hospital room, and a yelling Kimito, and the wrong name etched into hardened clay. "If that stupid branch hadn't broken, he would've been Kimito's successor, and I…" He caught Yuri staring at him expectantly, and scratched his hair with a halfhearted grin. "I don't know. I would've had someone fun to annoy."

Yuri chuckled, then reached over and touched his shoulder.

"If it helps," she told him meaningfully, "you do annoy Hejjiguchi."

"Definitely not good enough," he said, but the grin didn't waver from his face.

She didn't ask another question or press him for any more information, which was good, because he didn't know what else to say about that part of his life. Too many existential crises he didn't want to unearth.

Besides that, he supposed he could show her the place where Hayato had fallen. But then again, that seemed too macabre.

"So I guess we're caught up on each other's profound personal secrets then," he said, looking at her hopefully.

"Yeah…" Yuri confirmed with a light chuckle, and he was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when her eyes sprung open and she kind of slapped at his sleeve in realization. "Hey, wait! You never told me your thing!"

Ayato jumped at the contact, blinking twice in bewilderment. What was she talking about? "I just finished telling you—"

"Not your sad backstory!" Yuri said impatiently, grabbing at his arm and jostling it a little. "We had a deal, remember? On my birthday I said I wouldn't ask you about your thing if you didn't ask about mine. You got mine, what's yours?"

He gawped at her, dumbfounded. "I sort of screamed it at you after the fight. When you were walking away."

"You did?" Now it was her turn to bat her eyes cluelessly. "I didn't catch it."

"Oh," he said, doubtful. She was so keen to hear it. After all they'd discussed today, he wasn't sure. "Well. I mean, I've said it before, it wasn't that big a deal—"

"Ayato."

He sighed, giving his bangs a petulant huff.

Still Yuri prodded at him, and leaned on her elbow again like she was waiting patiently for a juicy story. "Come on. I think it had to do with your mom, and… trusting her with something?"

He sighed again. She was never going to let up. It was only fair, and it would get worse the longer he put it off.

"I'd made you a gift for your birthday," he told her, arms crossed as he recalled three months ago. He could still see it – cradled in his hands, in his mother's hands, in little pieces on the floor. "A coffee mug, glazed mostly purple with some green at the top."

Yuri's eyes brightened at the thought, clearly picturing it herself. They were her favorite colors.

"My mother offered to hide it for me until I could give it to you. Stupidly, I let her." His palm smacked against the railing, which startled Yuri a bit. Then he saw her face dim as she realized she had never gotten the mug. "Kimito found it the next day, and…" He chewed at the inside of his mouth. "Well, I'd rather have given it to you in one piece."

Yuri pushed herself up from the railing and turned to face him, stunned and vaguely apologetic.

"I told you that you didn't have to get me anything," she said, quietly but firmly.

"But I wanted to."

"Your presence was enough."

"It's not enough."

"It is to me," Yuri insisted, putting a hand over her heart. "You came to see the play. My parents wouldn't even do that."

Her parents were on another business trip? Then again, this didn't come as too much of a shock. But Kimito would probably be itching for their patronage within a week. And also, more importantly, he could hear the pain in Yuri's voice.

"They missed out. It was a good play," he told her. She beamed at him. Embarrassingly enough, his stomach punctuated the review with a low growl. "But very long," he added, and reached down to pick up his schoolbag.

He was discreet in sneaking a cake from his bento box – Yuri's kick from earlier must've shifted the lid – but apparently not discreet enough. Yuri missed him popping the cake into his mouth as she sized up his schoolbag.

"You have food?" She stepped closer and tried to peek into it expectantly. "I'm hungry too – I was onstage the whole time!"

He quickly swept it away from her prying hands. "Not the whole time."

She swiped at it again. "C'mon! What've you got in there?"

He held it up out of her reach – but neglected to consider the fact that she was a good jumper.

"Hey!" he protested as she successfully wrestled the bag from him.

"Now you're just being suspicious," Yuri said cheekily, and glanced inside. Then she gave a teensy frown, as the bento box's innards had spilled out during the struggle. "Wait." She reached in and picked up a cake, narrowing her eyes. "Where did you…"

He grinned at her.

Yuri stared.

"You…" She squinted some more, a light dawning on her crinkled face. She broke the cake apart and inspected it, then looked at him again. "You didn't. Did you?"

"Did I…?" he prompted, with an innocent head tilt.

Yuri looked flustered. "No! How could you have known that—"

He grinned some more, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. How could he have known? What a wonder, with talkative Ami in his class!

Apparently the same epiphany struck Yuri, whose eyes went wide with disbelief.

"You!" she gasped, hitting him with his schoolbag. "I can't believe you!" The schoolbag dropped from her hands and she gave him a playful shove.

Ayato cackled hysterically as she batted at him – not even very hard, somewhat like frenzied flaps of a giant bat's wings. It only added to his triumphant laughter, and he easily grabbed at her flailing hands to intercept. She toppled slightly, pulled in by his snag.

It occurred to him then that they were now very close, him still holding her by her wrists. But had they ever really been cognizant of personal space? Yuri's cheeks were faintly tinged with pink. Though it could very well be stage makeup.

She smirked at him, flushed with pleasure. "You're evil, you know that?"

"I can be," he said loftily.

"There's no limit with you."

"None."

"You'd really do anything for me."

Encouraged by the impressed lilt in her tone, he started to make a noise of agreement. And then her words settled, and they made their impact. Like the ceramic mug against the wall, like the strawberries against Horigoshi's system. Like, more pleasantly, her commanding presence up there on that stage.

I would, he thought, staring at her. I really would.

Yuri stared back, green eyes – vaguely aqua – alight with intrigue. A particularly strong wind coasted through, teasing at her hair and making the wooden bridge croak in dismay. For a moment, the forest smelled like autumn and chocolate and powdered stage blush.

And then, moderately muffled by a schoolbag, Yuri's cell phone gave a hearty buzz.

Whatever had taken hold of him in that moment broke instantly. Ayato coughed nervously and looked away, releasing her wrists when she cleared her throat. She bent down and retrieved her phone from a pocket.

"Oh, it's Ami." She peered at her phone and began to read the text out loud. "Where are you, are you okay to join the after party? You just missed Tachibana. Man!" She snapped the phone closed in defeat. "I totally forgot!"

When she looked up at him uncertainly, he waved a hand in dismissal. "Go. You deserve it. I should be getting home, anyway."

She accepted this at first, starting to send a reply text. Then she frowned at him. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"What?"

"Your ceramics display is still at the school." Ayato closed his eyes and cursed under his breath. When he opened them, Yuri was looking over her shoulder from halfway across the bridge. "Walk with me?"

Picking up his schoolbag, he made quick strides to catch up with her, and they began the trek down the dirt trail towards town.

A/N: So ends this arc! Things might go at a little faster pace after this, honestly. It was October for 7-8 chapters! I like slowburn but I can't afford that much slowburn... knowing when certain things are supposed to take place. (Well, I'll forgive this arc because school festivals are fun.)

Anyways, while I work on both fics and decide when to start them back up, I leave you with a taste of what's to come.

Preview:

"There's something we haven't discussed."

"It wouldn't be that bad."

"She's not mad at me, right?"

"Take me to your idiots."

"You were so sad without each other."

"I don't snoop for free."

"Speak of the devil!"

"She seems kind of nice."

"Show some discretion!"

[Chapter 32]: Branching Out.