They moved closer together, by fates own power, it seemed. They caught glimpses of each other, where-ever they went, and the very next semester they shared every class. And everywhere Michiru went, that boy was there as well.
It was wearing heavily on Haruka's nerves. She thought she might take a very long holiday.
It was in Chemistry, of course, that the world stopped.
Well, no, it wasn't anything so horribly dramatic as that, but it was horrific.
She was leaning over her notes with purely affected attention (actually watching fixedly as her teacher's toupé slid slowly down the back of his head, tugging at the hairpins holding it on.), when she heard a horrible scraping sound behind her. Someone in the back began to cough: huge, hacking, hideous, lung-twisting coughs. She jumped to her feet and whirled around to see Michiru's ever-sickly companion spewing blood across a lab table, and clutching helplessly at his chest.
It went on for an indeterminable period of time, as she watched, frozen, something deep within her leaving her no doubt that she was watching someone die.
She was unaware of the screams echoing throughout the classroom, the teacher rushing to phone for an ambulance, even of Michiru's tears, and vain efforts to comfort the boy's heaving body.
All she saw was the eternal, revolting and obsessing spectacle of the end of a human life.
His eyes began to roll up in his head, and it seemed, for just a moment, that those warm brown globes fixed on her own eyes, held her gaze, even as his body stilled and crumbled toward the ground.
She stood where she was, staring into space, long after the corpse had been taken and pronounced DOA at some hospital somewhere.
She was unaware as Michiru put gentle, fate-filled arms about her shoulders; unaware of that musical voice asking after her health. She didn't notice that she had put her arms around the girl, or that Michiru had collapsed against her in hysterics.
She could never remember how they came to be sitting in the same wretched little eatery where she had first laid eyes on Michiru's constant companion.
She didn't even notice when the black rain began to fall over all the Earth, though her clothes were horribly stained with the stuff when she awoke, sprawled across Michiru's couch.
