1 – You Don't Choose Love

"You can't blame gravity for falling in love." - Albert Einstein

Death had a funny way of inching itself into Chisaki's life.

Death - or, as the adults told him, a car crash - had been one who had taken his father and mother. Death had been the one who had taken his respectable, responsible, kind adoptive grandfather. Death had been the cause of his adoptive mother abandoning him after his adoptive father's funeral.

Death had always been present in Chisaki's life. Always haunting him, always keeping in awake at nights, reminding him that he was alone. That everyone had left him. So by the age of eighteen, Chisaki had told himself that he was immune to death.

Of course, he was wrong.

By some miracle - and his family's savings - Chisaki was able to make it into a nearby college and study there. Every day was torture. Every minute he wasn't studying was spent calculating whether or not he would have enough money, getting letters of rejection from multiple companies, and applying to another place for work. He barely slept at night - the nightmares and worries would always find a way to catch up to him. It was horrible.

Until he fell in love with Fukukado Emi.

She had unnatural sea-green hair - He suspected she had dyed it - that reached just past her shoulders, a well-built frame, and dark emerald eyes. She was pretty, yes, but what Chisaki really fell in love with was her smile.

That smile, brilliant and blinding, was what he looked forward to every day. That smile, as bright as the sun, was the only thing that kept him from jumping off the roof of the dorm buildings. That smile, beautiful and stunning, was what Chisaki fell in love with.

They met face-to-face a few weeks after the opening ceremony, at a nearby restaurant.

"I didn't order this," Chisaki told the waiter, voice as dead as his voice.

He didn't normally go out to eat - the unsanitary environment and strict budget forced him to eat at the college. Besides, that's why he spent the money to buy a meal plan, right? But he had somehow allowed himself to be swayed by his classmates to dine out with them for someone's - he didn't bother remembering - birthday party. He immediately regretted it when he saw the price ranges on the menu. Still, politeness and manners were at least one of the things engraved in Chisaki's mind and he ordered a small bowl of macaroni and cheese.

"The lady on the other side of the table paid it for you," the waiter responded immediately.

Chisaki's head whipped up from the fancy plate of spaghetti, letting his eyes follow the man's outstretched hand. He was met with the cheerful, laughing, grinning face of Fukukado Emi.

When she noticed that he was staring at her from the other end of the table, Emi gave him a quick wave, smile growing wider by the second. She was rewarded with a scowl.

Finally.

He never knew that college students could talk for such a long time. If it hadn't been that the restaurant closed at nine P.M. his classmates surely would've continued talking throughout the night. Thankfully, the restaurant did have a closing time relatively early, and Chisaki was saved from having to use his faithful excuse of having to study for the next day.

The owner ushered them out rather impatiently so Chisaki quickly followed his classmates, grabbing his coat, straightening his tie, and was about to make a mad dash out of there when someone tapped on his shoulder from behind.

"Don't you think you owe me a 'thank-you'?" a laughing voice asked.

He immediately spun around, prepared to strike down whoever had touched him, when he realized it was the girl who had paid for the spaghetti. His eyes narrowed as he prepared to gather his thoughts - stop staring at her face - and retort intelligently when she continued.

"You looked kinda gloomy so I decided that a bit of spaghetti would be sure to cheer you up!"

Gloomy? Him? As if he hadn't heard that before.

"It's appreciated, but you don't have to do that next time," he responded curtly before turning around again and walking in the opposite direction.

"Hey!" she called after him. "Where are you going? You're not going to have ice cream with us?"

So he still did have to use his excuse. "I need to study."

Chisaki Kai was not a man who fell in love easily. He hadn't gone to college to fall in love, nor was he prepared when he did.

It had happened so fast, so quickly, he didn't even know what he was feeling. He just found himself itching to finish his studying to chat with Fukukado about senseless things. It was Fukukado who had approached him after the birthday party, and she was also the one who had decided to steal Chisaki's phone with the help of his only friend, Kurono, to give him her phone number. When he had noticed it a few days after, he immediately went to her and demanded an explanation.

"From what I can tell, Hari is the only person you associate with. You've got to stop bothering the poor guy and make other friends!" was what she answered with cheerfully.

He didn't take the trouble of deleting her number or contact info at first. He just never responded to any texts or calls she sent. Incidentally, he also learned something through ignoring her calls and texts. She never slept.

In the beginning, it was just annoying - receiving the notification tingle past midnight when he was trying to sleep. He tried silencing his phone, but was chewed out by Kurono when he missed a message about an important question for the upcoming test. So he was forced to turn his notifications back on, at the cost of constantly being bombarded with the ringtone.

After the third week since his phone got stolen, Kurono was the first to notice the bags under his friend's eyes.

"Chisaki, you're not sleeping well, are you?" the white-haired man asked, eyes narrowing in suspicion and concern.

Chisaki shrugged it off. He cared a lot about germs, bacteria, and getting sick, but beyond that, he deemed everything else - like being sleep-deprived - unnecessary.

"I've been waking up in the nights, but it doesn't really matter," he responded flatly.

Kurono sighed, closing his eyes as he tried to reason with his astonishingly - and sometimes annoyingly - stubborn friend. "You need your sleep, Chisaki. You can't just study and ignore your health."

"Of course I can."

It was times like this when Kurono wondered why he ever stuck with Chisaki. "No, you can't. It's bad for you."

The dark-haired man looked up from his lunch, eyebrows raised up high. "Germs are too. And yet, here people are, gathered in the same area, eating. And when they're not eating, they don't even put a mask on. How unsanitary is that?"

"Chisaki-"

"Hello!"

Rubbing his tired eyes in frustration - he was probably also sleep-deprived - Kurono looked up irritably to see who had just interrupted him.

"Can I join you?" Fukukado asked, peppy smile and jump in the step there as always.

Before Chisaki could utter an adamant No, she set her tray down and plopped herself into the seat beside the germaphobic man.

"Thanks!" she grinned cheerfully before grabbing a pair of chopsticks from her backpack and - rather energetically - picking the pizza up.

It took a few moments before Fukukado realized that they were both staring at her. When she did, she tilted her head to the side while chewing the pizza. Her green eyes were big in confusion as they waited for them to explain.

"I... never saw anyone eat... that... with chopsticks," Kurono started slowly.

Fukukado nodded silently, trying to finish chewing her food before explaining. "You see," she said, putting her chopsticks down after devouring her lunch.

"Eating with hands is kinda unsanitary so I have to wash my hands before and after - which is a huge hassle - so I figured it'd be easier to just eat with chopsticks or forks or somethin like that, you know? I was born and raised in Japan anyway, before I came to the States for my mom's job, so chopsticks are like an extension of my body!" she concluded proudly.

Wiping his hands with a wipe and putting his jet-black mask back on, Chisaki raised his eyebrows. "You're from Japan too?"

Fukukado beamed at him, huge smile growing across her cheeks. "Yup! You too, I guess, eh... Kai?"

Silence followed as his eyes narrowed, a look somewhere between accusation and mockery. Before Kurono could apologize for his behavior, the aqua-haired girl grinned and stared right back with furrowed brows matching Chisaki's.

Seconds, minutes passed as the two college students continued trying to murder each other with their impeccable not-blinking skills.

"I'm just going to leave you two here while I go ace my biology test," Kurono said dryly, standing up after a good ten minutes of silence and staring passed.

He paused a moment, to see if they were actually going to continue like that - apparently, they were - and sighed before honoring his promise of leaving them to fail whatever class that was after their lunch break.

So maybe it was because Fukukado said the phrase "Eating with hands is kinda unsanitary" - which Chisaki thought was so true - or maybe it was simply because she was the one who emerged victorious in their staring contest, but whatever it was, he started replying to her texts. No calls though - he claimed they took too long. Little by little, he inched out of his shell and stopped only associating with Kurono. His classmates saw him more often, and not just in the bathroom, trying to scrub off some minuscule speck of dirt on his jacket's sleeve.

And once, Kurono even saw Chisaki and Fukukado alone at a restaurant near their college. He thought he was going to die of laughter. And that was saying something, since the white-haired man was almost always stony-faced.

The next time Kurono found his life on the line was when he eavesdropped on his friends' private conversation. It wasn't really his fault, since they were talking in Chisaki's room - which was technically his room too, since they shared the same dorm room. He was minding his own business when he heard Fukukado laugh. He had been planning to go to a friend's dorm, but Kurono was a nineteen-year-old who just heard a girl laugh in his room. Nobody could blame him for being curious - or suspicious. One look into the room from the slightly ajar door told him that Fukukado and Chisaki were just studying together, so he decided to let it go as long as Chisaki cleaned up whatever mess of papers and pens and erasers left.

At least, that was what he had decided until he saw Fukukado stand up on her tippy-toes and kiss the brown-haired man on his cheeks. He also just realized Chisaki wasn't wearing his mask.

Obviously, he was confused. Actually - confused didn't even come close. Chisaki without his mask? Fukukado kissing him on the cheek? How in the world did he not notice it before? The two of them eating dinner alone? That had been a date. Kurono quickly tried to recount how many times he had seen the two of them alone. After a moment, he realized that it had been too many times for the two of them to just be friends.

Wait. Where did Chisaki get the money to treat her to dinner so many times? Kurono sighed, rubbing the bridge as his nose as he began to remember small details that he hadn't bothered to think of before. He vaguely recalled Chisaki saying that he was busy on the weekends. Had he found a job?

And just like that, it came to Kurono. Chisaki was more than qualified to do many advanced jobs, but he never got accepted to any of the jobs he applied for. He had always suspected it had something to do with the germaphobic man's... slightly unapproachable attitude. Perhaps spending time around the ever-laughing Fukukado Emi softened him out. Maybe Chisaki was even smiling now, and he just didn't notice.

Kurono made a mental note to himself: Pay more attention to Chisaki's behavior. He was thoroughly confused, but he would ask his friend later, alone. For now, he just had to actually get to his friend's dorm before said friend started complaining about being late.

But he was going to get to the bottom of this. After all, being a friend meant that you had to know their love life, right?