Title: Cassette Player

Summary: For all of his amazing academic skills, Riku can be shockingly thick at times. Shiki, of course, takes full advantage of this.

A/N: I've been writing lots of fanfic and original fic that will never be published heheh, and haven't posted a single thing all summer. Hopefully this will somewhat make up for that. ^^; I think the tenses are changing between each chapter, but EFFORT. Live and let live, you know. ;)

"What is this."

I glanced over to where Riku was sitting beside me and scowled; jerk must have already got his maths homework done, and we still had ten minutes of class left! How the heck was he so smart? Okay, so I kind of fluked all of my tests (and somehow got A's in languages...) and only studied for them the night before... so that was probably why. Stupid brain arguing with logic. Totally overrated, that.

SO. Um, back to Riku angsting over a cassette player. "Shiki."

"Do question four and I'll tell you."

He'd swiped my notebook off me before I'd even finished. After a minute or so of intense frowning and intenser (is that really a word?) scribbling, he handed it back to me. I didn't bother telling him that he already had the question done in his own book; for some reason, he liked doing things as Many Times As Possible. Weirdo.

"Cheers. Now, Riku, that is a fabulous invention made long ago, and is now rusting away in your schoolbag – wait wait wait; why do you have it if you don't even know what it is?" FLAWED LOGIC. Also is that... nah, it couldn't be... but nothing else is quite shaped like that...

"Josh must've dropped it in," he muttered half-heartedly. "Jerk." That explained everything.

The teacher glanced over at us from her computer, so we both dropped our heads and looked like we were doing work. When she looked back to her screen, Riku glared at me. "What is it?" he whispered.

"You seriously don't know?" I mocked.

Silence.

"Dude, you're a genius."

Silence.

"A whiz at everything, and you don't know-"

"Just tell me!" he hissed.

"Cassette player."

Look at me. To wall. Back to me. Look hopelessly confused. Riku followed the script to a capital T.

"...But there's one on the wall, and it-" He shook the poor white thing uselessly. "It looks nothing like this."

...Okay, so I lied. SOMEHOW Riku had Neku's music player. If I was to take a guess, then Josh, being Josh, swiped it off Neku during our last sleepover at Neku's place and smuggled it into his brother's bag. It made sense, 'cause I remembered that Neku, after freaking out via the phone at not having done his homework yet again last night, then moaned to me for a good half hour straight about his missing music, and how he was going to sting Josh's organs on his mum's washing line and other gruesome things because although he had no evidence that it actually had been Josh he just knew that Josh was a prick and Rhyme was too nice (I didn't have it in me to correct him) and Beat was Beat and that if I'd done it I would be stuttering over the phone faster than a shifting record.

Still, Riku was Riku, which meant that he was both woefully smart and woefully stupid, all at the same time. No fun just telling him that it was Neku's Very Inappropriately Shaped Music Player. (Beat had pointed it out once, in his own unique way, and Neku didn't speak to him for, like, a week.)

"Handheld, Riku." Oh he was so ignorant sometimes.

"Handheld ones exist?"

The girl next to him – Ashe, I think? - elbowed his side and muttered some words that most girls wouldn't dare use. "Do you ever shut up? That is obviously not a cassette player."

"How would you know, princess?" I snipped back; we'd never gotten along, since she took offence at EVERY LIVING THING if it dared to breathe vaguely in her direction. Much too posh... and much more attractive than me.

She ignored me (like usual) and got back to assaulting the boy next to her. Poor kid. "Vaan, if you take one more of my pens-"

"I really don't like her," I muttered. "Why the heck'd you sit next to her?"

"Uh, she sat next to me?"

"Must be the hair."

Riku didn't ask for an explanation; my grin at his quiet groan was enough. "Wait, what's... string?"

"PLEASE tell me that you're encountered string before..." He was holding the thing up as if it was a terrible bomb. Which, in hindsight, it could easily have been; Neku was strange.

"Of course I have! I just..." It was to hang around a person's neck, duh. I had to resist the great urge to groan; Riku was really stupid sometimes. "...It looks like Neku's... thing, this."

"Neku has many a things." Including LOOSE BUTTONS GRRR.

"It's not a loose button," he said dryly. "Or else his shorts are growing weirder by the day. Somehow." He grinned.

I coughed loudly to hide my laughter. The teacher glared at us again. "Sorry, Miss! I just, uh, I have hayfever, and it makes me cough-"

"Winter," she said gruffly, sounding more like a man than a woman.

She didn't like to talk much. Did I mention that? "Comes on randomly!"

"She takes tablets for it," Riku said, and suddenly, the whole class fell silent. The sound of squeaking pens and phone keys was no more. "But she forgot to today. Was moaning to me about it all morning."

Her nose twitched, then she glanced down, back to her screen, and the classroom surged back to life. VICTORY!

"You think she brought that?" I asked, furiously scrabbling down vague guesses to the rest of the questions and hoping that they made sense. What was even the point of Pythagoras' Theorem..? I'd never need to know how to draw a perfect triangle!

"Not for a second."

Cue someone's phone going off at OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD VOLUMES. Also, shockingly bad lyrics. I think I heard something about sky pirates, what the heck?

"Vaan." That was the teacher.

"VAAN!" That, was Ashe.

After the drama over his phone ended (with the teacher chucking said phone out of the classroom, and insisting that if it broke then Vaan picked the worst phones ever), the bell went, and we all barged out of the class like bulls.

I think someone stepped on the phone.

SOMEHOW me and Riku made it to the lockers with all four limbs intact, and I hurried to shove in my maths books and take out my art pad. Riku had technology now, and our two rooms happened to be next to each other (the two teachers were totally going out with each other).

"You still working on that clock project in tech?" I asked Riku as I was burrowing through my locker in desperate search of my pad. Ohh, don't say that I left it at home again! Fifty munny that Kairi stole it to look at all of my fashion designs; she's got a fetish with my work, I swear.

"Can't find it?" Riku said lightly. "Want me to take a look?"

"I'll be fine!"

Two minutes later, and I was not fine. Riku wasn't either, as I'd taken to using him as my new manservant.

"It's gotta be in here somewhere..."

"Y'know, Shiki," Riku mumbled. I think. The sheer amount of folders and files he had blocking his face made it difficult to be sure. "Willing it to appear won't suddenly make it appear."

"It's gotta be in- for the love of-" NEKU HAS IT OMIGOSH. He asked for it yesterday since he'd ran out of paper at home! Gods, why did I only figure that out now!? "Neku has it!"

My manservant coughed sceptically. "Really?"

I shifted a few lockers to my right, went up, squeaked when I found myself in Sora's locker, quickly slammed the door shut and went down. Sure enough, this locker was much more of a pigsty. I spotted my book sticking out of his hideous Jupiter of the Monkey sports bag WHICH HAD A BUTTON LOOSE. I swear he does that just to watch me squirm. Ugh, I was already, like, five minutes later, but LOOSE BUTTON..!

Three guesses as to what I did.

"Shiki, we're ten minutes late," Riku grumbled as we trudged down the silent hallways. A teacher brushed past us and gave us an Extremely Suspicious Look; it wasn't difficult to figure out why. "Mister Hitomi is going to kill me."

I was too smug about fixing the button to really care. "You offered to stay behind."

"I did not!"

"You're just my little shining knight, aren't you?"

"What is your obsession with knights?"

"They're fantastic in chess!"

"...Shiki."

Actually, they were crap, because Beat (weird, I know) ALWAYS took my queen with his knights somehow. "Uh-huh? Hey, Riku, look; Hitomi's not gonna kill you. Just say that I blackmailed you to help me track down some missing books. I'll take the blame, jeez, just get in there."

"But-"

"It'll be fine." I patted his shoulder in what I hoped was a Manly Display of Affection. "By the way, that wasn't a mobile cassette player; it's Neku's music player."

He whirled around to face me. "But-"

"Have fun!" I then shoved him through the door.

I didn't mean for him to land face-first on his teacher's back I swear. That just kind of happened on its own. He was only meant to hit the door handle and suffer temporary injury to his hand, not to his ego (which was pretty huge, and would no doubt recover before lunch).

"R-Riku!"

"Uh."

The whole class burst into sniggers, and I slipped away before Riku could pin the blame on me.