There is a change.
Not the change everyone has felt, as midterms came around. Not the change in power. E-class is ruling the leader boards, and a rebellion - a revolution - is on the way. You can see it, in the way people move, the way they stare at Gakushuu, who, for once, is number 2.
He's not top dog anymore.
But the change he feels is not one within the school. The one he sees is in Nagisa. Nagisa Shiota, who used to be his confidante. His friend. The river where they used to meet, to, for a moment, throw off the chains their families had placed on them. His chains are the ones of success, being cruel and strong in his actions. He isn't allowed to love or be kind. He is meant to be strong. Nagisa was meant to be a girl, a sweet, smart girl.
Was.
Now he is free. Somehow, impossibly, unthinkably, unimaginably, he has cast off the chains, he has made them shatter into a million tiny pieces and he is free. Nagisa's face is brighter, lovelier, and a smile now graces his features instead of the forced one only Gakushuu could see. He laughs and talks, and his mother is there too, but somehow they are closer and the rift between them has disappeared.
In the main school he was miserable. But since transferring to E-class... He has become free. Free from the constraints of his mother. Free from society. Free from the strict regulations of the school, up in the mountains. Gakushuu looks up to his headmaster's office. He is not free. He is bound to his father. The chains are tighter than before. He is bound to his reputation. The people inside the school only pull those chains tighter and tighter and tighter until he is suffocating, dying and -
He wonders what it's like to be free.
