I am a very awful person for abandoning this for so long. I'm sorry, I just fell out of love with Kyouya and Wild Fang (please don't kill me, fangirls) and had no ideas for this story.

Please assume that this story will only continue from now on if I am hit by a sudden (and unlikely) bolt of inspiration.

Chapter 3 – One More Night

I

There were days when Nile genuinely didn't know why he'd teamed up with Kyouya.

Those were the days when Kyouya disappeared in the mornings and didn't return until very late the following evening. The days when Kyouya was silent on matters that really needed his attention. The days when he casually played along with whatever Benkei had decided to do and apparently forgot that he actually had a team now, a team who still fell apart at the slightest provocation because none of them were quite certain with each other yet.

The days when nothing Nile did was good enough, when he was ignored simply because he wasn't Gingka.

II

There were days when Kyouya genuinely didn't know why he'd teamed up with Nile.

Those were the days when Nile sneered at him when Kyouya called for his full power, when he refused to use Mystic Zone because Kyouya wasn't using the Reverse Wind Strike. The days when Nile refused to take opponents seriously. The days when he thought of the battles before he thought of the war, and as such was willing to let a victory slide away in order to claim the prize. The days when he took everything Kyouya did completely seriously, when even Benkei knew that Kyouya could both give and take a joke.

III

Thankfully, neither of them had those days on the same day.

Which was lucky as if they had, the future of Team Wild Fang would have been rather bleak.

But every time Kyouya vanished, Nile remembered the blaze of war in his team-mate's eyes as he had thrown himself headfirst into a tornado, and gave him one more chance to prove that Nile had chosen right.

And every time that Nile held back, Kyouya remembered the first time he had faced the full might of Mystic Zone, remembered all the chances Nile had given him, and gave his friend the benefit of the doubt, and one more night – and, unknowingly, the proof that Nile was the one who knew Kyouya best after all.

I took a word-association test to help someone with a project a while ago. One of the words was "Lion". I immediately wrote "Kyouya"... then had to backspace because there was no way anyone would work out what on earth that was. In the end, compromised on "tornado". I wonder what they're going to think of that when they come to the analysis...