Goodness, I feel the love! Thanks once again for all your nice and uplifting comments. They make me want to put my all into this story.
This is the longest chapter yet!
Chapter 3
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
– Marthe Troly-Curtin
o0o
The next day, Kish popped into Ichigo's bedroom as usual and was immediately greeted by a shopping bag shoved into his hands. He quirked an eyebrow. "What's this?" he asked, pulling the handles apart to look inside.
"Hair dye and color contacts," she answered. "I stopped by the drug store on the way home."
Only then did Kish notice that Ichigo was lifting a pile of towels off her bed. He looked on curiously as she began walking toward the door. She gestured for him to follow. "Come on," she instructed. "My parents aren't home yet. We need to get this done now before they can come back and barge in on us."
Kish followed her dutifully down the hall to the bathroom just the same as the day before and watched with interest as she pulled a chair up to the sink and laid one of the towels on the rim. Ichigo then went back to the door and locked it before turning back to him. "Take off your shirt," she commanded as she took the bag from him and started pulling out boxes and setting them on the counter.
Kish raised an eyebrow at her but didn't comment. He simply untied the loose cord at his waist and pulled his long tunic over his head. There were a thousand jokes he could have made just then but he kept silent for the sake of maintaining peace. Clad now in only his pants and sarashi, he waited for further instructions.
When Ichigo finally looked back at him her eyes widened just a little as they landed on the thick, jagged line of scar tissue that ran from his collarbone down across his chest. She froze for a moment as she looked at it with a face that had drained of much of its color. Kish just watched her without reaction.
"That scar," she spoke at last. "That was from when the Blue Knight… from when Masaya-kun…" She seemed unable to finish. She bit her lower lip and actually looked guilty as she turned her eyes away from him.
He shrugged. "Don't worry about it," he dismissed breezily as if it were some old wound that had nothing to do with her.
Ichigo continued to worry her lower lip and glanced back at his chest before meeting his eyes again. "Kish…" she started, looking uncomfortable. "I didn't…" she broke off again. "I never realized…"
He held up a hand to silence her. "Really, it's fine," he told her firmly. "I brought it on myself." He pointed at the sink and cocked an eyebrow meaningfully. "Come on, don't we have to finish this before your parents get home?"
Ichigo still looked guilty but she nodded in agreement. Becoming somewhat less awkward as she got back onto the groove of her task, she had him remove the ties from his hair and then sit down in the chair. "Lay your head back she commanded."
The next ten minutes was a cycle of lathering and rinsing and lathering again that would have been quite enjoyable were it not for the uncomfortable pressure on his neck. Kish lost himself in thought as Ichigo's fingers massaged his scalp. He thought of his planet and how everyone was getting on in his absence. He wondered if Pie and Tart were holding down the fort okay and if the elders were grumping and moaning about his irresponsibleness. He rolled his eyes beneath his closed eyelids. He didn't doubt they were. Old bags.
Finally, Ichigo tapped him on the shoulder and said, "All done."
Kish lifted his head from the sink with some reluctance. It was nice having Ichigo touch him in such an intimate and nonmalicious way. Once again, he found himself wondering why he ever thought that fighting her was a good idea. Why did he think violence was a way to her heart? The more he thought about it, the less sense his actions a year ago made to him. Even though it was only a year, it almost felt as if his memories of that time belonged to a stranger.
The image that greeted him in the mirror was unsettling in its offness. His forest hair had become a deep charcoal, just a shade or two shy of black. The damp strands of his fringe fell in wet clumps across his forehead and stuck to his cheeks. He looked like a Johnnies idol that had been dunked in a swimming pool.
"What do you think?" Ichigo questioned, placing her hands on her hips. She looked satisfied with her work.
Kish looked back at his reflection and made a face which his odd, dark haired double copied. "I look… Japanese, I guess."
He saw Ichigo's reflection behind him smirk. "Not yet, you don't. We still need to take care of those eyes."
Ichigo carefully cleared away all the evidence of their dyeing session and then ushered him out of the bathroom and back into her room where she handed him the bag with the contacts. "Think you can figure out how to put these in on your own?"
Kish just nodded and got to work unpackaging the lenses. Contacts were something he was familiar with. Pie had once acquired a pair out of curiosity and he and Tart had been made his test subjects. They'd both spent an hour wandering around with one blue eye each laughing about how they could be the new Deep Blue. Kish smiled faintly at the memory as he scooped out the contacts one at a time and applied them to his irises. When he was finished, Ichigo handed him a hand mirror and he once again was made to look upon his newly altered visage.
He smiled when he saw the color Ichigo had chosen. The hue was an earthy amber, not too far from his natural eye color. It was far less jarring than the blue Pie had chosen. Together with his newly darkened hair and round, human ears, he definitely looked the part of the common Earthling. He ran his fingers through his hair to break up the clumps and shook his head to help the strands settle. He hardly recognized himself, but he supposed that was the point.
"I'm probably going to regret saying this," Ichigo spoke from beside him, "but you actually look pretty handsome. As a human, I mean."
Kish lowered the mirror and looked back at her. He let his lips curve into a smirk that had Ichigo rolling her eyes. "Don't fall for me so easily, Kitten. I'll feel bad if after all that effort I put in a year ago a simple palette change was all it took to win you over."
Ichigo just sighed. "You're indefatigable."
"Good word. Remember that one for the test."
Ichigo plucked the mirror from his hand and stowed it in her desk drawer. "Now that your hair and eyes are done, go get changed so that we can get back to studying," she instructed, closing the door with a snap. "Each moment wasted is a point lost on the exam."
Kish simply smiled and teleported to the bathroom to do as he was told. He liked this new, less-hostile version of Ichigo. Now that they weren't at each other's throats all the time, he was learning things about her he'd never realized, or perhaps they were traits that only surfaced around him. Traits such as her dry snarkiness, which had come as a very welcome surprise, and her unexpected sensibleness. Around her friends and the brat, Ichigo always acted cheerful and somewhat vapid, but he got to see the side of her that was bright and down to earth. Likely this was because she simply didn't care enough to put up a front with him, and while that should make him feel bad, it only served to make him fall in love with her all the deeper.
This trip had been a very terrible idea. Kish wasn't letting go. If anything, interacting with Ichigo like this was only making him hold on tighter. He was a damn fool for thinking he could walk back into her life with no repercussions; thinking he could just leave whenever he wanted. He couldn't.
But, he thought as he pulled his arms through the sleeves of his white uniform shirt, he just couldn't find it in himself to care. Ichigo was his weakness and that was a part of him that was incontrovertibly immutable. Whether or not she got into her dream school with her perfect boyfriend, Kish would not regret helping her.
o0o
From that day on, whenever Kish studied together with Ichigo, he was no longer Kish, but Keisuke, a fellow third year who was often absent from school due to traveling with his parents. This was the story Ichigo told her mom when 'Keisuke' showed up at the door later that evening claiming to have arranged a study date with Ichigo.
Ichigo's mother was confused to see a new face at her door, but she welcomed 'Keisuke' amicably enough and seemed impressed when he told her he too was aiming for Hibiya. "I had no idea there were so many motivated students at Ichigo's school," she remarked as Kish took her hand in greeting.
Being Keisuke took some getting used to. The school uniform was stiff and restrictive and Kish frequently found himself having to push his unbound hair back from his face as he flipped through Earth textbooks at Ichigo's low table. Ichigo clearly found his struggle amusing because she frequently looked up at him with a twinkle of mirth in her eye. Kish felt like the butt of some private joke, but having Ichigo laugh at him was better than having her shout at him and was certainly a vast improvement over last year, so he said nothing on the matter. He wished he could tie up his hair, but Ichigo had informed him quite sternly that his signature style was very much not in fashion on Earth and would only cause him to stand out unnecessarily.
Despite his hair-related woes, the two of them were managing to have a productive study session. Kish was helping Ichigo understand the citric acid cycle—apparently called the Krebs cycle on Earth after some bigshot American biochemist. Humans were awfully self-aggrandizing, he thought privately, naming a natural life process after themselves as if they'd invented it. Maybe if they spent less time trying to own things, they would be more productive about trying to protect the things they so direly sought to own.
Ichigo seemed to have a fair grasp of the general concept of the cycle, but she struggled with remembering the specific chemical reactions at each of its stages. She'd written down all the step in a table and was studying it intently as if she thought she could burn it into her memory simply by holding it front of her face long enough. Maybe she could.
"Do you really need to know the whole thing?" Kish asked, idly spinning a pencil in his fingers as he watched her. "That seem a bit excessive, don't you think?"
Ichigo shook her head behind her chart. "That's the level of studiousness expected from Hibiya students," she informed him. "If I can't even remember something like this, then there's no way Hibiya will look twice at my exam.
"Remember…." Kish didn't try to hide his distaste as he repeated the word. "Again with the memorizing. What is it with you humans and memorizing things? You know that's exactly your problem, right?"
Ichigo finally looked up from her paper. She furrowed her eyebrows at him. "What do you mean?"
"I mean you're not trying to understand any of this. You're just trying to make it stick in our brain." Irately, he plucked the chart from Ichigo's hands and slapped it down on the table. "Alright, listen up. We're going to go over this from the beginning. Pay attention to these chemical compounds." He pointed to CO2 an H2O. "Now, beginning with our initial Carbons…"
Patiently, Kish explained the turns of the citric acid cycle and the chemical transformations that occurred along the way. It took some time, but eventually Ichigo began to get it. Kish noticed that it helped greatly when he used the common names of the chemical compounds. That made the cycle easier for her to visualize. After about forty-five minutes of running through it and making modifications to Ichigo's chart, she could more or less reproduce the cycle on her own.
Kish nodded, pleased, as she capably walked herself through the final step. "There you go. Better?"
Ichigo nodded and looked up from her paper to offer him a grateful half-smile. "Way better. I feel like I'm not just shooting in the dark anymore. Now I just have to remember everything you told me," she joked.
Kish wagged a finger at her. "Not remember. We don't memorize, we understand," he reminded her. "You can't forget something you understand. So if you're determined to remember something today, remember that."
Ichigo laughed and made a gesture with her right hand that Kish didn't recognize. He imagined it was some kind of human military salute because she followed it with, "Roger that, Chief."
Kish couldn't help but return her teasing with a grin of his own. A joke! From Ichigo! He ever thought he'd see the day. His serious, no-nonsense Ichigo never made jokes. Not to him, anyway. Did this mean they were becoming friends?
He hoped so. It wasn't what he wanted, but he could settle for that.
Friends with Ichigo… He took a second to mull that thought over. Yes, he decided, if being her friend meant that he could continue to see her every day, he could definitely settle for that.
o0o
Because Kish now came to study under the guise of an alter-ego, it didn't make sense for 'Keisuke' to show up for two separate study sessions before and after Aoyama, so the two settled into a new arrangement where instead of coming straight home after her work finished in the café, Ichigo would meet Kish at a nearby Doutor for a short study session before going to her house to meet Aoyama.
Kish found he preferred this arrangement as it allowed him to enjoy a warm milk tea while they pored over textbooks. It became a habit for him to wait at the café for Ichigo to finish so that they could go together, as waiting at the coffee shop by himself quickly became boring. Though he never did anything to call attention to himself, it didn't take long for Ichigo's friends to pick up on their routine. It started with vaguely confused glances at his person as he waited with a plate of cakes for the shop to close for the third day in a row, and as the days passed the looks became curious and then borderline suspicious until one day the blue girl finally decided to confront him.
Mint wore a look of deep suspicion as she brought him his usual tray of cakes. Her eyes raked over his form, lingering on the sewn-on patch displaying Ichigo's school emblem briefly before settling on his face. "Keisuke, right? Ichigo says you go to her school," she spoke without preamble as she set the cakes in front of him. Her eyes narrowed as they studied his face. "I'm sure I've never met you before… but you look familiar."
Kish smiled disarmingly. "Maybe you've seen me around?" Mint was sharp. Kish knew any hint of who he really was needed to be carefully buried lest she see through his disguise. For now, he would act the part of the perfect gentlemanly classmate.
Mint's frown deepened. "Perhaps," she allowed. Kish thought she would leave after that, but to his surprise, she pulled out the chair across from him and took a seat. "Ichigo says you've been helping her study for the Hibiya entrance exam."
Kish didn't allow his smile to falter. Persistent, isn't she? "Yes. I'm taking the exam as well, so she came to me for a little extra help."
Mint hummed and nodded knowingly. "That girl needs all the help she can get," she agreed. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her seat. She eyed Kish down the slope of her nose. "It's very kind of you to offer your aid, but you do know why she wants to go to Hibiya, right?"
Kish had to stop himself from outwardly cringing. "Because it's the school her boyfriend is planning to attend."
Mint nodded. "That's right. So do yourself a favor and try not to get too attached. You should know that Ichigo only has eyes for him."
Ah. So that's what this was. A warning to the starry-eyed new guy. Kish thought it was surprisingly kind of Mint to go out of her way to spare his feelings. She'd never struck him as the type.
But Kish knew better than anyone how doomed his chances were. "I'll keep that in mind," he promised.
Mint's lips curved up into a small smile and she pushed her chair back to stand up. "As long as you know," she said. "We all know how much it means to her to get into that school, so we're grateful to you for helping her. Just don't get any funny ideas about competing with Aoyama. For your own sake."
Kish smiled wryly. "Noted," he said mildly. Even without Mint telling him, he knew better than to think he could ever outmatch Aoyama. At anything.
With a final parting nod, Mint left him to his confections. Kish sliced into a piece of strawberry cream cake with the side of his fork and lifted the bite in front of his face where he considered it with a bland expression. "Aoyama this, Aoyama that," he grumbled, rotating the fork in a slow circle. "He's just like this cake—uninspired sponge. Pretty on the outside but no substance. No personality. I honestly don't understand what she sees in him." He shoved the bite in his mouth and chewed slowly. The cream was sweet but utterly flavorless. He stuck his tongue out petulantly.
In another hour, Ichigo had finished her shift and the two relocated to Doutor. Kish happily sipped his usual milk tea as he looked over Ichigo's math. He noted with pride that she'd made considerable gains since he'd first begun tutoring her. She was no longer spending hours scouring her textbook just to figure out how to do the example problems. While he checked her work, she moved on to history and she was currently tapping her pencil against her cheek as she perused an article in her textbook. She looked confused and a little frustrated.
"Tell me about it," he prompted, pushing the math away. The best way to affirm understanding of content was to teach it to someone else. It was a technique he utilized often with Ichigo when she was having problems.
"It's all these dates," she grumbled. "In 1599, Tokugawa Ieyasu forcibly took control of Osaka Castle, starting a war between those who supported Mitsunari and those who opposed him. Ieyasu's group, who opposed Mitsunari, eventually won in the battle near Sekigahara in 1600, making Ieyasu the de facto leader of Japan. That's all well and good, except that he didn't actually receive the title of Shogun until 1603, and I'm never going to remember that."
Kish put his cheek in his hand and smiled. "How about inventing a story to explain the three years it took him to become Shogun?" he suggested. "It's just like with your "Krebs" cycle: If you can find a way to make sense of the matter, remembering it won't be so difficult. For example, maybe Ieyasu got super lost on his way to Heian Palace to receive his title from the emperor." He lifted his free hand and, spreading his fingers, drew an arc in the air above them. "Imagine. Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the three great unifiers of Japan—absolutely no sense of direction. Behind his back, his friends jokingly referred to him as 'Tokugawa I-can't-find-you'."
Ichigo laughed and swatted his arm. "That's ridiculous."
Kish grinned. "Ridiculous enough to remember?"
His answer was a beatific smile that made his heart flutter. "You know what? Yeah. If nothing else, I'll remember that."
Kish hid his blush behind his bangs as he returned to checking her math. Ichigo was far too cute when she smiled. He wanted to take her smiles and put them in a box for only him to enjoy. Curse Aoyama for the millionth time for stealing her heart!
By the time he'd finished looking over her work, the clock had already hit 6:45, meaning it was time for Ichigo to return home and have her usual study time with Aoyama. The girl in question glanced at her watch and put her pencil down to stretch her arms high above her head. "It's already that time," she remarked, sounding a bit put out. "I was making such good progress."
Kish grinned. The fact that Ichigo was actually bemoaning having to go see the brat tickled him oh, so pleasantly. "I'll be around at the usual time to pick back up where we left off," he promised. "So go have fun with your boyfriend."
Ichigo sighed. "Fun… yeah. Sitting quietly and poring over textbooks is such a hot date idea."
Kish arched an eyebrow. "I've been enjoying it."
Ichigo laughed softly. "It's different with you. You can make anything fun."
Kish's heart leapt. He had to repeat Ichigo's words in his head once before he would let himself properly believe them. Could it be… that he was actually outmatching Aoyama at something? She'd called him fun. Him. Not that boring block of cold konnyaku she was dating. Kish was desperately tempted to say something snarky but he didn't want to ruin the moment.
"I just wish there was a way to fit in more study time," she continued, saving him from his inner debacle. "Evenings just aren't enough with the exam only two weeks away."
Kish's mouth formed a straight line as he considered this. He had no other obligations—he was free as a bird all day every day—but she had school and her job at the café. If she wanted to fit in more study sessions, she was going to have to get creative with her time. "How about lunchtime?" he suggested, the idea coming to him suddenly. "I can come to your school and help you during your break. The school library is usually open during lunchtime, right? Nobody would notice one extra student."
Ichigo's eyes lit up. "Would you? That would really help me out!"
Kish nodded. "Just as long as you can tear yourself away from Aoyama for that hour," he teased.
"Sure, sure. No problem," Ichigo answered breezily. "The library is the last place anyone would think to look for me, anyway."
"Then it's a date," Kish said, wiggling his eyebrows.
Ichigo shoved him playfully. "In your dreams, space nerd."
Ichigo quickly packed her things and rushed from the coffee shop to make her study date with Aoyama while Kish watched her go with an amused half-smile and cleared away his empty cup at a far more leisurely pace. Normally, he would feel a stab of jealousy when Ichigo left him to study with her boyfriend, but today, his heart felt light. He continued to repeat Ichigo's former remark in his head. "It's different with you. You can make anything fun."
It wasn't much, but he felt like he'd scored a victory over Aoyama today.
"More fun," he repeated to himself in a sing-song voice. "Well, of course I am!"
He threw his cup in the trash and deposited his tray on the return shelf with a spring in his step. He wasn't ever going to let Ichigo take back those words. She would never even think to, because "fun" was Kish's middle name.
oO0Oo
Just a quick note: I have a few pictures for this story that I'll be putting on tumblr sometime in the near future. I'll post a link to them in the next chapter, so look out for it!
