AN: Er, delayed yes. I have many excuses, none of which you will care about. For the moment, just be grateful that I got this out at all. My momentum has been severely lacking but I am still writing, I swear. (Just don't expect good writing.)

Chapter 5

After his last class, Hideaki went looking for Arima and found him by the bushes outside the P.E. building. The dark-haired boy was staring into the foliage with an expression of confused dismay.

"Soichiro?" Hideaki asked worriedly. "Are you okay?"

Slowly, Arima turned and walked toward him, head down. Hideaki watched him curiously, sensing depression but no dark, violent emotions.

"Hey— are you blushing?" he asked suddenly.

Arima touched the back of his neck self-consciously. "Is it… normal for girls to touch each other?"

Hideaki blinked rapidly, surprised. "Uh, girls can be more touchy-feely than guys. You mean like hugging?"

"When I walked in there, Miyazawa had her hand on Maho's," Arima said, still looking at the ground. "And Maho's hand was on Miyazawa's… breast."

Hideaki grinned, picturing Arima's reaction. "They could be teasing or comparing bra sizes. Girls do stuff like that. They have no shame. You know Yukino, right?"

Arima lifted his head to see if Hideaki was joking. He looked much more relieved.

"Or, they could be doing a little afternoon experimentation. Ah, Hokuei High locker room lesbians."

"Asaba!" Arima protested. He made a half-hearted swiping gesture with his hand that the other boy dodged easily.

"Do you seriously think Maho is interested in Yukino?" Hideaki scoffed. "She has an older boyfriend, you know."

"I know," Arima said. "It's just weird seeing them like that."

They had started walking back toward the main building. Hideaki tilted his head toward the boy beside him. "You should hear the stories about what goes on in the all-girls schools."

Arima suppressed a smile and pretended to cover his now-pink ears with both hands. "I don't want to hear your perverted gossip, idiot."

"I'm just the innocent messenger," Hideaki insisted. "They're the nasty perverts who've polluted the minds of so many pure school boys."

Arima chuckled despite himself. "Pure? After all the things you say?"

"Vagina!" Hideaki hissed dramatically and this time Arima couldn't stop from laughing. He kept walking beside the taller boy but his frame shook with uncontrollable, contagious mirth. Hideaki bent his head toward Arima's red face and they laughed like immature middle school boys sharing a dirty joke.

By the time they reached the school they had composed themselves and Arima looked to be in much better spirits. His gaze sharpened as he saw Yukino standing with Aya and Rika outside the building. All three of them looked very worried.

"Miyazawa," Arima called. Then he caught sight of Tsubasa in the center of the yard, arms wrapped tightly around the waist of a boy with spiky bleached blond hair.

"Shibahime?" he said, walking quickly to her. "Are you okay?"

The strange blonde boy extended a hand, eyes bright with welcome. A silver chain choker on his neck glinted in the afternoon sun. "I'm Kazuma, Tsubasa's new brother," he said. "I want to thank you for taking care of her."

Watching him, Hideaki understood the fretful look on Yukino's face. For the longest time, Tsubasa had been Arima's protected little sister and now this handsome outsider suddenly laid claim to that role.

Arima looked at him for a moment, and then took the hand with a wide, genuine smile. "Pleased to meet you," he replied. "I'm Arima."

Kazuma beamed back at him, pleasure evident on his face. "Tsubasa's told me lots about you. It's great that she had someone like you to take care of her for so long."

Positive energy seemed to flow between them in a visible stream of light and Hideaki stared at the two smiling boys in pure bafflement. How could this punk-looking teenager make such a strong immediate connection with Arima when it had taken Hideaki weeks to get that smile?

"He seemed really cool," Arima said when they entered the school, walking to one of Arima's council meetings.

Hideaki muttered something grumpily. Luckily, Arima didn't seem to expect a real reply. His gaze went out to the gray clouds gathering in the sky outside the window.

"Looks like rain tonight. Are you staying late to practice your show?"

Shaking his head Hideaki thought sourly of his broken umbrella lying by the door of his apartment. "No, I'm working on scenery for the girls."

The sun was going down slowly and long shadows covered the hall. Outside, young, high voice rang in the cool afternoon and Hideaki paused at the window to watch a troupe of school girls walk past the building. Their uniforms were neat and clean, skirts moving against smooth legs. As first years, they still had the flush of excitement that comes with high school and the opportunities of fresh, blossoming lives. He felt that if he watched long enough, he could actually see them opening like flower buds in the sun.

"There's nothing like the laughter of a lovely young girl," Hideaki told Arima who stopped to watch as well.

Arima's mouth turned upward gently, but there was a question in his eyes. "Are you interested in someone, Asaba?"

Hideaki shook his head, pushing his facial muscles to beam back at Arima. "I can't choose just one girl," he declared. "It would be incredibly unfair to all the rest."

This triggered a bigger smile from Arima, a knowing grin with a hint of exasperation. Hideaki felt the familiar flare of something bright and warm inside his chest and he decided to push his luck.

"Of course, there's only one boy I could like." His eyes shone meaningfully back into Arima's skeptical expression.

"That's not what I asked," Arima insisted. He didn't seem upset at all, just a little sad, and the concern in his voice confused Hideaki. Absently, Arima adjusted the book bag on his shoulder and stared out the window intently. Hideaki wanted to put an arm around those tired-looking shoulders and say something understanding or playful, but he sensed that was not the moment, that Arima was worried about him.

"You never tell me about yourself, Asaba, at least not what you do outside of school," Arima said, looking into his eyes. "You act like it's all a game sometimes. I never know what girl you're dating or where you want to go to college. I don't even know what your career plan is. Aren't friends supposed to know things like that?"

No, they aren't, Hideaki thought. You've seen as much of me as I want you to see. But he didn't say this. He just smiled agreeably and shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, I haven't really decided on a big, exciting career path yet, probably something in art or the service industry," he said, glossing over the idea of a host job. "As far as girls go, I've dated several and I feel that no matter who I go out with, it will go perfectly smoothly. I just haven't found the right person yet, I guess."

Watching him attentively, Arima nodded at this, tilting his head slightly as he listened.

"When I find the right one, I'll give everything to her, and do anything to make her happy," Hideaki said, touching the edge of the window ledge. The paint was beginning to come off the wood and its roughs edges scratched against his palms. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Arima's dark hair, the curve of his ear. "There's always someone out there, right?" The words came out remarkably easily.

"Yeah," Arima answered. He seemed comforted by Hideaki's speech and his eyes looked clear for a moment, like transparent pools of deep water. Hideaki felt the moment stretching between them easily, like a breeze of warm air.

Suddenly, Yukino's voice rang outside the window. "Watch out for the bench!"

Arima's eyes darted to the scene below, where Yukino and Tonami were working together to carry a long, polished bookcase to the building that the play would be in. They made a strange-looking pair, extremely mismatched in height with little Yukino holding the lower end in her thin arms, shouting directions as towering Tonami stumbled awkwardly backwards, twisting his neck to see where he was going.

"Can't you lift it any higher?" he complained.

Hideaki smiled at the sight and felt a twinge of guilt for not getting there in time to help them. He turned to say as much to Arima but he felt the boy stiffen beside him and his skin prickled with a too- familiar chill. Arima's mouth tightened in a hard line and his eyes took on the old blank ice. Beside Hideaki, he watched the comical team with their burden as though there was no one else in the world. Another might have interpreted his gaze as calm, disinterested observation, but Hideaki knew the lethal edges in that ice. Arima closed off the outside world as easily as shutting a door. His face remained composed, but his hands were clenched at his sides in pale, tight fists.

Gingerly, Hideaki reached to lay a reassuring hand on Arima's shoulder. It's alright, he wanted to say. She's not interested in him. His fingers barely brushed the rise of the clavicle before Arima reacted, shoving the arm away violently with a quick, powerful movement. Hideaki withdrew slightly, holding his aching limb, but he didn't back away from Arima's harsh glare.

"What do you want?" Arima hissed, his face drawn with pale fury. Hideaki remembered that day so long ago when he dared to bait Yukino and Arima had shoved him into the locker. Once again he felt startled by this raw, terrible love in his friend's body. I want you, he thought. No, I want you to have Miyazawa.

"I want you to be happy," he said.

Silently, Arima turned away and walked rapidly down the hall. For a moment, Hideaki wavered, rubbing his arm indecisively. But his mind was already made up and he followed after, without saying anything at all. The fear he held for Arima had less to do with what Arima could do to him and more with what the tormented boy might do to himself.

On the hard surface of the hall, Arima's shoes pounded out a steady rhythm and Hideaki had to nearly run to keep up with him.

"I'd like to be alone, Asaba," Arima said firmly, without turning.

"I'd like to be with you, please," Hideaki replied. His voice sounded amazingly calm in his own ears, a direct contradiction to the rapid beat of his heart and the sweat on his hands.

They ended up in an empty classroom. Arima sat down at a lonely desk in the corner, resting his forearms on its polished surface and bending forward, as though praying, or bowing in fear. Hideaki took a seat in the desk beside him and waited silently, watching the contained tension in the dark-haired boy's face, the strained angle of his neck.

"I'm so stupid," Arima growled at last, "thinking that she needed me as much as I need her."

"She does," Hideaki argued automatically. He wasn't sure if he believed this or not. Yukino was remarkably self-sufficient and independent, after all.

"No." Arima made the single word hard and sharp. "She doesn't need me to be happy. She was perfectly happy before she met me and there are plenty of people who can fill my place in her life."

"Yes," Hideaki said heavily. "You are stupid." His thumbnails scraped against the textured surface of the desk. "Love isn't about need… well, not completely at least." He stumbled with words, unsure of himself suddenly and finally admitted, "I don't really know much about it… but I know Yukino told me that she fell even more in love with you after you came back last summer and… that she is trying to become a more complete person to understand you better."

Arima's head jerked upward to face him, eyes wide with a furious desperation. "I don't want her to understand— to see this," he said, voice rough. "If she knows who I really am, what I'm really like…"

"Soichiro," Hideaki started to say but Arima was already out of his seat, moving to the exit.

"I'm late for the meeting," he said stiffly. "Please don't say anything to Miyazawa."

"Of course I won't," Hideaki replied adamantly. He watched Arima walk through the doorway, shoulders squared with rigid determination. "Arima," he said, "don't take it out on Tonami. "He's just a dumb kid."

"I know," Arima replied. But there was no understanding in his voice, just a stark, harsh acknowledgement. And Hideaki sighed in defeat, dropping his head to the surface of the desk. He could see the anguish and fear breaking the perfect form of his best friend from the inside out and he had no idea how to fix it.

-

The school hummed with activity the week before the fair; students rushed about in thrifty disorder like ants from an overturned hill. Hideaki walked down the hall, dodging two boys struggling with a large signboard and a teacher with a stack of forms. He did offer to help a pair of girls carrying some books, but they blushed and told him it was no trouble at all. He caught sight of Yukino engaged in conversation with Aya and Tonami, gesturing fluently with her enthusiasm. He didn't see Arima nearby, and this bothered him slightly.

Wandering up the stairs, he sipped a cold can of soda in one hand and held his CD player in the other. Someone had scratched a long black line halfway up the railing in one trailing, wobbly stroke. Hideaki followed its path with one finger until it ended in a wispy curl.

Outside, the sky stretched endless pale blue dusted with a few bushy white clouds, bright and clean with possibilities. Hideaki looked across the white expanse of the roof from the door at the top of the building,. "Arima," he said.

The dark-haired boy sat on the smooth tiles with a book propped on his stretched out legs that looked suspiciously like a dry list of regulations. Briefly, he glanced up to meet Hideaki's gaze with calm, veiled eyes, but he didn't smile or speak before turning back to the text on his lap.

Popping open the soda, Hideaki took a slow drink and moved to sit beside Arima, setting his can on the tile beside him. He faced away from Arima, looking out at the grounds beyond the railing and the students milling like insects on the green lawn.

"Are you okay?" he asked quietly.

Arima said nothing in reply. A soft beat thumped in Hideaki's ears and the tile of the roof gleamed white as Tsubasa's bared teeth. He closed his eyes and felt the sun shining through his lids, inescapably bright.

He could sense Arima shifting behind him and suddenly there was a warm weight leaning against his back. The hard points of Arima's shoulder blades pressed into his flesh and soft, smooth hair brushed against the back of his neck. Hideaki felt, rather than heard, the sigh rolling through the smaller boy's body. The rhythm of Arima's breathing echoed in Hideaki's frame with each pull of the lungs, and he felt slight tremors running through the small form.

Hideaki didn't open his eyes. The sun burned strange images into his pupils, dancing specks of light and dappled patterns. The warm burden of Arima against his back felt lighter than a flower petal and heavier than the entire world. That's why you love me. A sweet, full silence stretched between them, heavy with trust and a quiet acceptance that Hideaki didn't want to explain. Arima leaned against him, and that was enough.

-

Hideaki stepped onto the cold tile of his bathroom floor and turned on the water to heat his shower. Shivering, he slipped a disc into the player on the shelf above the sink and pulled off his shirt. By the time the first track had ended, steam began curl over the yellow curtain rod. Hideaki adjusted the temperature and removed the remainder of his clothes, hurrying into the warmth of the shower.

"I want to reach you," he sang with the vocalist. Scented soap foamed between his fingers. "When did the road get so long and narrow?"

He had once enjoyed dancing in the shower but an unfortunate slip a few months ago had warned him away from such behavior with a large bruise on the back of his head. "You'll crack your scull open, prancing around like that," his father had warned him when he skipped around the house as a child. Thinking of his father made him think of Arima then. He had once told Yukino that Arima reminded him of his father and being with Arima somehow helped him work through issues with his dad. She had looked at him with a sudden appraising gaze, as if trying to peer into his head.

Rika's voice floated back to him. "Sometimes I look at you and I wonder who you really are."

Squeezing a generous portion of strawberry shampoo into his palm, Hideaki tipped his head back into the flow of water to wet his shaggy blonde hair completely. Arima's face came to him again: Arima who never questioned who Hideaki tried to be, or tried to pry into his intentions. Of course, Arima ignored him sometimes, disregarded his feelings, and really controlled him in a way that Hideaki himself could not fully comprehend. But all the same…the dark boy drew him, fascinated him, and even needed him at times.

He leaned back and let the water wash the shampoo from his hair, closing his eyes at the sensation of heat against his scalp. Arima lay on the grass beneath the sakura trees with drifting blossoms settling on his face and in his hair. He exhaled softly and a petal landed on his lips. Hideaki drew in a quick breath of steam. Arima set down his shinai and took off his helmet. His hair stood up in crazy, sweaty spikes, his face was flushed with exertion. He smiled at Hideaki who was standing on the sidelines. And it didn't matter if it wasn't a real smile, if he had given it to a hundred others every day, because right now it was a smile for Hideaki alone, and he could pretend whatever he wanted.

Stop it, he told himself, stop this right now. Water ran down his back and shoulders in searing streams. But Arima stood on the beach in his long swim trunks and pulled off his baggy t-shirt. Of course Arima could look beautiful in a t-shirt—he could look beautiful in burlap sack. But when he pulled that shirt over his head to reveal the long, smooth stretch of his back and looked up from under dark, mussed hair, laughing at Yukino with his eyes crinkled against the sun and the brilliance of his own happiness…Hideaki could hardly breathe.

The air in the shower was too thick, too hot. His skin slid under his fingers, slick and feverish. If you're going to do this, think about a girl, he ordered himself, because it was too late to stop, too late to think of ignoring this.

Some girl, any girl. Images slipped before his mind, the girls on the beach, the women on the street, but none of them would stay. And Arima lounged on the bed beside him in the quiet bedroom, indolent and untouchable. Arima's voice came to him through the darkness of the night, soft and husky on the phone. Arima caught him by the shoulders and pushed him hard into the lockers, bruising his forearms, burning with contained passion, kissing his jaw roughly, biting his neck. Hideaki gasped. Arima's wet tongue, harsh teeth and nimble fingers blurred in a storm of delicious, torturous sensations and his touch hurt in its haste and ferocity. It all came too fast, too hard, in a single potent moment and Hideaki's body blazed out in a flash of light, like a dying star.

For some time, he leaned against the slippery tile of the shower wall until the water felt real against his skin and the music drifted in again. Straightening his body, he twisted the knob to add more cold water to the shower. Hideaki stood in the spray for several minutes. Then, laughing cynically at himself, he reached for the conditioner.