A few minutes into lunch break, and Kikuchi had already bumped into all of Saeko's closest friends. He'd received different versions of reprimanding from his classmates; a couple of guys glared at him, their lips defined in profound scowls, and several of others walked past him without even the slightest gesture of acknowledgement.

You'd think, by now, that he would've mastered the glorious art of apathy.

It's true that how he propositioned her seems harsh, but it didn't come guiltless. He wasn't desensitized enough to feel absolutely unaffected by the fact that he hurt someone, just enough that he risked the chance of hurting that person to begin with. With the results of their encounter weighing on his weary conscience, he sat at a deserted table and isolated himself from the rest of his known society.

He didn't despise himself, not really, but he did hate the fact that the things he did could affect other people so negatively. He'd examined this logic over and over - took the concept and attacked it from different directions. It shouldn't be so difficult. Why should anyone suffer just because he changed his mind about monogamous relationships? Why should anyone take it personally if, after breaking up with Kanzaki, he has sold himself to the world as one who is incapable of falling in love?

He'd only given himself to this modified way of living for some three months and it was already taking its toll on him... Not physically, rest assured. Psychologically? Probably. Emotionally? Quite likely. And mentally? Oh, yes. Meaning, this whole dating strategy is already defeating its own purpose. He wanted with raw desperation to stop thinking, to have his cerebral soliloquies muffled by anything that had enough potency to overwhelm his naturally focused senses.

He hadn't done any of it to replace Kanzaki. Oh, no, not that. Never that.

It's not as if she was the theme upon which obsessive revolutions were centered in my mind's workings. It's not like I needed any and all forms of distraction from the lamentations of what had gone wrong between us - no, that's not the case at all.

This is a familiar sight. Kikuchi uncertainly mourns over another person's crumbled pride as he continues to renovate his own, convincing himself of whatever he needs to - less successfully than he would when the charade is erected for someone else's sake - with every logical fiber in his body.

He pulls out of his own world long enough to prepare himself for Saeko walking towards him. He rearranges the muscles on his face to make himself look apologetic - although by some frustrating reason, he helplessly felt as if he looked more forgiving than penitent. The reply he got for his troubles was a pointed exclamation of silence, as Saeko rushed past him with distinct indifference. He sighed and berated his features for looking so damn smug half the time.

He indulged in what she probably wanted him to do: he turned and followed her with his eyes as she stomped off with exaggerated nobility. His interest in where she was going had left him as soon as it came, and his eyes strayed towards the vast field that was situated near the cafeteria. He caught Yoshikawa walking up and over the large uprooted remains of a tree, his slow trudges matching the glum look about his eyes.

Ah, so Yoshikawa was moping about again. Kikuchi felt mildly worried, as he suspected more than half the class felt whenever Yoshikawa's well-being was concerned. It's not like the guy was popular or that he'd made friends with so many people. But Yoshikawa, to everyone aroud him, would always look like a boy who would need someone to protect him, to comfort him... partially because that's probably the case. Kikuchi had done his part that morning, tried to be a good friend to him, but it didn't seem to have made a big difference in the grand scheme of things.

His thoughts shifted from one thing to another, and he wasn't aware how much time he'd lost before Murai and his obligatory posse came to remedy the calmness that had come to surround Kikuchi.

"You never tutored me."

It took awhile to follow Murai's wavelength... Not that this exercise was particularly challenging. "...I'm not tutoring. I just offered to help him with Latin. Latin's tough."

"So's Math!" Murai cried. Beside him, Fujiyoshi and Kusano nodded.

Kikuchi shrugged. "Yoshikawa got himself a dominatrix girlfriend and got her to teach him Math."

"He gets Latin, I should get one subject, too!"

"What's wrong with you? You're worse than an ex-girlfriend."

Murai actually stepped back from Kikuchi's table. "Uh, ew."

From behind Kikuchi, a voice asked mischeviously, "Is this the part where I get insulted?" Kanzaki smiled at them and sat across Kikuchi.

"We're friends, okay, but I won't have you involving me in your fucked up little fetishes..." Murai looked pissed (not that there were a lot of instances when he didn't), Kusano looked fairly sick, and Fujiyoshi just looked embarrassed by what was happening. Kikuchi's eyes were expressing as much disgust as Murai's entire face.

Kanzaki cleared her throat. "This house believes that the conversation must be taken outside, tied to a tree and beaten with a stick." Kikuchi just sighed at her debate jargon, while Murai was struck with an idea.

"Okay, I know, Kikuchi can tutor Yoshikawa and then I can get Kanzaki," Murai suggested, with a note of triumph.

"You don't 'get' anyone, Oedipus" was Kanzaki's snippy reply; simultaneously Kikuchi had encouraged Murai softly, with an unpromising "Sure, good luck."

"I hate you all." Murai turned to Fujiyoshi as they walked away. "Who's Oedipus again?"

"Er, I think I remember him from some history class... Not Roman... Persian? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was Persian."

Kusano's head could be seen shaking vehemently before the three of them disappeared from view, and their voices gradually got softer as they headed inside a nearby building. The last thing Kikuchi could make out was Kusano saying "No, you so made that up. He was from, like, a poem by this gay guy..."

"So, how are you?" Kanzaki asked Kikuchi, so suddenly and so... cheesily that he felt his heart skip a beat. Having her greet him like that proved to be quite a scare.

"I thought we promised not to talk about each other." Kikuchi impressively supressed a wince. "And stop that."

"Stop? Being nice?" Kanzaki provided, sounding sympathetic.

Kikuchi didn't answer her, and once again a small sliver of guilt found itself streaking across his heart. "Is it just me or am I being avoided by Murai's minions? Or maybe Kusano and Fujiyoshi have gotten more responsible? Because, if I remember correctly, they used to be as insistent about tutoring as Murai was. Of course, between the two of them, they were better at bribing."

Apparently not interested, Kanzaki declared, "I'm doing fine."

Her ex-boyfriend felt no urge to congratulate her for her current condition in life. "And listening attentively to what I'm saying, too."

"I was listening. Yes, as of late, Murai's friends act pretty skittish when you're around. I suspect Murai would be equally wary of you, if only he didn't need you to provide stepdad-boycotting grounds." Kanzaki made a show of looking thoughtful. "Must be the gender-bendy playboy thing. 'Gender-bendy', gods, will you listen to me? I'm becoming something else these days."

Yeah. Happy. Kikuchi's eyes widened as he realized just that... Kanzaki was happy.

"Oh, well. As they say, change is the only permanent thing in this world. I mean, look at you. Asexual one day, admittedly attracted to me the next, and, well, typical male thereafter. Such was the evolution we've had the privelege to observe..."

Kikuchi looked up from his food after a few seconds, when he realized that silence settled upon them without Kanzaki's cheerfully disturbing it. "Was I supposed to say something in return?" he wondered aloud, confused.

"You were supposed to discuss why you've become so obsessed with sex," she explained. "I mean, theoretically, most guys are. But you're a) actually making it known like you were making up for lost time, and b) acting upon it."

"Oh. And I have to... give you my reasons?" he asked her slowly, as if still trying to extract a point from their exchange.

Kanzaki nodded. "Yes."

"Because...?"

"I want to know what's up with the whole sleeping around phenomenon with you. We've let it go by unmentioned for... what, how many months? I think we have come to the point wherein we can analyze the situation between us." Kanzaki looked at him seriously. "I won't allow you to blame this on a haphazard thought you decided on one night. No, there's a great, majestic reason for this and I want to hear it. Unless it's because you're trying to fill a void in your heart and one person isn't sufficient to fill out a space that I-"

"Hah!" Kikuchi released an unmistakably mocking laugh, almost as if it were an involuntary reflex. He winced. "Sorry."

"Ass. Whatever, I want to hear you defend yourself. Go on, present your arguments! And you better not give me those half-assed 'we're just teenagers anyway, what do we know about love' arguments. I want solid premises; I want your constructive logic, and not your excuses."

Kikuchi was almost worried about her. "Do you think, maybe, that this debate thing is taking up too much of your time?"

Kanzaki just smiled prettily. "I'm waiting. Tell me, why do you spit on monogamy? Defend yourself!"

"I don't feel that I have to 'defend' myself exactly," Kikuchi answered her, face betraying his apathy. "But first of all, monogamy has to do with marriage. I'm not married to anybody, although, come to think of it, I don't ever plan to be. It's not as if I don't want to be faithful, but what's there to be faithful for?

"Why is monogamy such a significant social conformance to begin with? We can see, historically, that it was basically these guys wanting to possess their women. For example, the Christians of yore. The commandment 'Thou shalt not covet your neighbor's goods' encompassed everything the 'neighbor' owned... including his wife. It was only later that they added the commandment to separate his belongings and the woman he married. That's the basic principle of monogamy... owning somebody. I just don't find that as ethical as society makes it out to be. Then the renaissance brings forth the ideal of romance. And later on we adopt romance to mean something that could happen exclusively between two people. It's a silly, overplayed evolution over an abstract idea that originated with extramarital affairs. Generally, marriage had been an arrangement that was political more than anything. We see this in the monarch system and in avoidance of marriages between mixed social classes. Love as a term attached to lovers who seeked 'romance' outside their marriage." Kikuchi was already tired of speaking, so he finished up lamely. "So there."

After Kikuchi concluded his less than impassioned speech, to his bewilderment, Kanzaki took a notebook out of her bag and began scribbling furiously.

Kikuchi felt like he was in therapy.

"Those were okay points," she said in a tolerant, matter-of-fact voice after she was finished writing. Kanzaki stuffed the notebook inside her backpack and gave him another winning smile. "We're having a mock-debate with this other school, and we've got a stupid motion... 'This house believes that couples marry for love.' Sad, huh? And we're Government, meaning I have to defend that. I want to preempt the arguments that the other side is likely to bring up."

And now Kikuchi felt, though ambiguously, like he had just been used.

Kanzaki basked in the achievement of her goals. "That was good!"

Kikuchi looked at her, at the lunch food, and back at her again.

"No, of course not." She scoffed at the tray below her, beaming up at her in all its cafeteria-food glory. "Not the food, dummy. I meant our conversation."

"Uh... You are aware that you just evaluated our conversation?"

"Well, I..." Kanzaki paused.

And we're back to stammering.

She recovered, letting out a theatric sigh. "You should be aware that you just pointed out something that could clearly bring up another awkward moment which will deter what is supposed to be a swift return to our normal friendship."

Kikuchi decided it would be best to play along, and pretend that they hadn't experienced a brief but undeniable rough spot. "However, it didn't bring up the aforementioned awkward moment."

"Of course not. We're making progress."

He was ready to joke about that, but he decided against it. They've made progress, sure enough, but they haven't actually accomplished the grueling task of repairing their friendship and shaping it into something that resembled the way things used to be. Nevertheless, that was one thing to be grateful about... and those blessings have come few and far between nowadays.


I have to talk to her... I should be the one to approach her. I can't expect her to come running to me after I left her like that last night. Yoshikawa groaned silently, kicking at the blackening bark of a delapidated tree branch. But what do I tell her? Do I just go up to her and say sorry? Do I even have the right to expect forgiveness?

I could be casual. I could start out by asking for homework help. Playing with that idea, Yoshikawa set up a plausible scenario in his head.

I don't know, is there a nice way of saying "I have very few friends and I need you, my math grades are going down"? How about, "I know it looked like I didn't like the kissing thing, but that shouldn't get in the way of you tutoring me. I'm an insensitive jerk. Please forgive me. Now let's be coupley and talk about quadratic functions."

Okay, that was screwed up. Utterly, malevolently screwed up.

There really seemed to be no way around the idea that while he cared for her, and would go so much as to say that he needed her, he didn't want her. He thought about the male stereotype when dealing with girls, and when he tried to associate his feelings for her with those kinds of thoughts... It repulsed him. It wasn't even the idea of being depraved or lecherous that he rather disagreed with, it was really the idea of her in an erotic situation... An emotion stirred in him, and it felt similar to the ones he'd had to recover from that time Takayuki had been so unrestricted when talking about her sex life.

He didn't see Anko the way he saw Takayuki, at least not most of the time. To illustrate the point, if Takayuki tried to hold his hand or hug him, he'd be much more opposed to it. But with Anko, it made him feel secure and cared for. Those touches were sweetly shared between them, and it made him comfortable with her and with himself. He even enjoyed that soft kiss of hers against his cheek.

When her hugs came with those extra movements, and when the kisses held a blatant undertone to them... When the rubbing emerged, when the little moans were breathed upon his ear, when the desperation came groping at him... Suddenly, he wouldn't be able to stand it. She said it would solve everything, but she may have been wrong about that.

As it was, she was still coming up with a solution. Although, she's moved on to another problem that needed dealing with. Her new problem went along the lines of Yoshikawa's most recent one, too.

"Look, I don't mean to imply that if I don't turn you on, you must be gay, but... Anyway. Don't feel bad, it's also probably my fault that I've scarred you for life and rendered you permanently impotent, but my mother wasn't paying any attention to me at that time."

Just like Yoshikawa, Anko was having problems composing her introductory lines. There's no need to remind him what a raging bitch I used to be.

However, unlike Yoshikawa, she wasn't going to let the awkwardness stop her.

Frustrated with the unproductive duration of careful plotting, she stomped all the way to the silly boy who was still moodily walking circles in the field. "Please, buy me food."

Yoshikawa blinked. "Anko?"

"Oh, I was hoping you'd recognize me." She smiled shyly, in contrast to the confident inflection her voice adopted.

Yoshikawa was still too startled to find her bipolar sarcasm endearing, instead he just wallowed in a safe and tried emotion... confusion. "You haven't had lunch?"

Anko shook her head. "You want to treat?"

"I could."

"Uehara! Lunch's almost over!" one of Anko's friends screamed from a distance, across the field.

Anko ignored her. She didn't know what time it was, but she wouldn't put it past her friends to make something up just to separate her and Yoshikawa... out in the public like they were. It had much to do with clique politics, and Anko presently couldn't care less about her reputation even if she tried. "Let's skip."

"I have Latin next..." Yoshikawa murmured weakly. With his godawful report card in mind, he still found himself reluctantly agreeing. "...but we do need to eat."

"Yeah. Yeah, definitely." Anko instinctively shot her arm out, and they loosely cradled one another's hands in one of those touches that Yoshikawa loved so much. "And we have to talk too. But that comes after the ensuring nutrition."

Yoshikawa laughed. He sounded a bit uneasy, but it wasn't a noise he had to force out of his throat; it wasn't a smile he had to force onto his face.

Anko led the way to the exit and they sneaked out together with almost ridiculous ease. Maybe there really is no way around it. I love him, but it doesn't look like it can happen, and I'll have to live with it. Anko knew she'd have to learn how it felt like to not to get exactly what she wanted... But she could still remain oblivious on how being empty-handed feels like.

As if to prove this, she looked down at her hand, still clutching Yoshikawa's.


Sorry about the "debate". I think I invented the entire renaissance thing. :/ (Note to self: It sucks writing characters who are severely smarter than you.) I was trying to get Kikuchi's story across, but I didn't want to engulf the entire first few chapters with flashbacks. Anyway, I've resolved to make more free time for this story... but first I have to get past Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokov for my English class. (Huff.) Once more, review responses on the webpage. Thanks, guys. :)