Title: Stumble and Fall

Author: Avelynn Tame

Disclaimer: I do not own Gokusen.

Summary: A new teacher has arrived at Shirokin, and he's not bothering to hide his attraction to the homeroom teacher of a certain delinquent class. 3-D greet him with their usual kindness and warmth, but Yankumi is far more interested in the reaction of one Sawada Shin…

Author's Notes: Okay, so for a long time I have been avoiding writing any actual mathematics content in this story on account of the fact that I would actually have to remember what we were taught at school. It was tough, but I did it for you guys. Unfortunately, it's difficult to write mathematical equations as part of prose, so they look a little weird. (Sorry this is late, by the way! I wanted to upload yesterday but it was all a bit mad at my house. Also, thank you all for your wonderful reviews!)

Chapter Four

Thursday was blessedly Maruyama-free, and the sigh of relief that was audible in the classroom when Yankumi arrived alone was echoed heartily by Shin. He wasn't sure how much longer he would be able to stay passive while Maruyama flirted unreservedly with their teacher.

They could tell that she was pleased by their good mood. She tossed her bag onto the floor, and folded her arms across her chest, smiling enigmatically at them.

When a few moments passed and a textbook did not appear, they began to grow suspicious. "Oi, Yankumi," said Noda. "Are you teaching us, or what?"

She hummed happily. "Oh, yes. But you'll need to push your desks back first."

They stared at her, nonplussed.

"Well, go on," she pressed. "We don't have all day."

Slowly, they rose, and did as she said, lining up their desks at the sides of the room, and stacking their chairs on top of each other. Then they were left standing uselessly in the middle of an empty classroom. "Now what?" Uchi wondered out loud.

Yankumi produced a tennis ball from within the drawer of her desk. "We're going to play a game," she announced, and at once they all groaned heavily. "Hey, what's this?" she demanded. "I'm trying to help you, here. This is going to be fun, okay?"

"Yankumiiii," Noda whined. "Can't we just sit down?"

"No," she snapped. "You're going to damn well play this game, and you're going to like it! So shut up and cooperate."

The grumbling ceased, and she smiled, satisfied. "The rules are simple," she said. "You all stand in a circle and pass the ball to the person next to you. Each person has to answer a question while they've got the ball. You get the question right, you can invent a new rule."

There was a pause as they digested this information.

"What do you mean, 'a new rule'?" Uchi asked.

She tossed the ball from hand to hand as she spoke. "Well, for example, you could invent a rule that says that people have to pass to the second person down the line instead of the person next to them, or that they have to throw the ball in the air and catch it a number of times before they pass it on. That kind of thing."

They stared at her. Minami asked the question that seemed to be on everyone's mind: "Why?"

She grinned. "For fun! And to help you consolidate the things you've learned by getting you to put them into practice on the spot." The grin became a little wicked. "Plus, I get to watch you try to remember all the different rules once the game gets going."

Shin rolled his eyes. Of course she would come up with something like this. But there was no way the others would go along with it –

"Okay," Noda shrugged. "So, we stand in a circle?"

Shin's mouth fell open as he watched the others arrange themselves as Yankumi directed. Things must be worse than he'd previously suspected if they were that cooperative. It wasn't too long ago that they would have fought tooth and nail against this kind of thing.

"Sawada," she said brightly. "Come stand here. You can start."

He made a face at her, and she stuck out her tongue in retaliation. Childish, he thought… but it took a good deal of restraint not to stare at her mouth.

He cleared his throat and looked away. "Fine." He held out his hand for the tennis ball, and tried to ignore the leaping sensation in his chest as her fingers brushed his.

She clapped her hands together. "Great! Okay, Sawada, your question is: y squared minus seven y. Factorise, please."

He hardly needed to think about it. "Y brackets y minus seven."

She sighed. "Sometimes your brain scares me. You're supposed to take longer to work it out!"

He smirked. "I can't help it if I'm smart."

"Yeah…" she muttered, her mouth scrunching up in a way he found horribly endearing. "A smartass brat, more like it. Invent your new damn rule, already."

He shrugged. "I don't know – pass to the third person down?"

Her eyes narrowed to thin slits. "You're just stealing my rule from earlier, but I'll let it go. This once. The rest of you better be more imaginative, you hear?"

An assortment of grunts and half-coherent words was all she got in reply.

Shin tossed the ball to the third person down the line – Kuma, who looked at it as though it were growing a nasty-looking fungus. "Yankumi," he began hesitantly. "What happens if we get a question wrong?"

She smiled kindly. "I beat the crap out of you, of course."

Kuma blanched, and swallowed nervously.

"Kidding," she clarified. "Relax, you guys, it's supposed to be fun."

However, they didn't loosen up until the sixth person in a row had got a question wrong and not been severely punished for it. By that point, Yankumi was writing the equations on the board instead of reading them out loud, and if anyone didn't know the answer she would go through it, writing each line and explaining it until she was sure that they understood what she was talking about.

Much as Shin hated to admit it… this was a little bit fun. For one thing, the rules were becoming more and more bizarre as time went on. Sainei had invented one that stated that people had to do an impression of an animal of their choice before they passed the ball. Chikamatsu had decided that everyone had to recite a haiku while hopping on one leg. And then Uchi, who was tired of trying to remember everything, decreed that all previous rules were null and void. This had led to a mixture of cheers of agreement, and bitter complaining, and the class had been split down the middle depending on their point of view.

Finally Yankumi had leapt into the fray and hit them all violently on the head, one after another, and told them to shut up.

Towards the end of the class, she had given up asking maths questions and had turned it into a 'how long can we throw the ball to each other without dropping it?' competition.

Shin refused to play, and was sitting on top of his desk watching Noda and Maeda argue about whether bouncing the ball off the lockers counted as dropping it, when a desk was pushed up alongside his, and Yankumi made herself comfortable next to him.

"You know," she began conversationally, "I was going to ask you about these guys being moody, but looking at them now, I guess it's not necessary."

He thought about this for a few moments. "Moody?" he repeated. Could she be talking about what he thought she was talking about?

"Yeah." She leaned back, her palms flat against the desk behind her. "It seems like these past few days… I don't know, they haven't been themselves. I was going to ask if you knew why, but they've improved, don't you think?"

So, she wasn't quite as dense as he'd thought. But she still hadn't picked up on the link between Maruyama and the atmosphere in 3-D. He wished fervently that she would – and soon. This first week felt like it was dragging on forever – and Maruyama was going to be with them for the rest of the year. Shin didn't think he'd be able to cope with this for much longer.

"They're having fun," he said at last. "It's kind of like old times, isn't it?"

"'Like old times,'" she echoed. "What do you mean?"

"Well…" He grasped for the right words. "Like how it used to be. You and us."

She blinked. "But – it's always that way. Isn't it?"

"Not anymore." The bell rang, and he hopped down from the desk, grateful to have an excuse to change the subject. "Guess we'd better put the desks back, huh?"

"What? Oh… yeah…"

She was distracted. He'd distracted her. He was glad – maybe now she'd start to put it all together.

He left her to think for a while, helping the others to put the room back the way it was, and eventually the only desk left against the wall was the one she was sitting on. He sidled up to her and dug his elbow into her ribs. "Oi. Kuma wants his desk back."

"Hmm? Oh, sorry." She slid down, and allowed Kuma to collect his desk.

She was still half-lost in thought, and it was probably her small, confused expression that prompted him to ask, "Why did you want to ask me about it?" She blinked, and he elaborated. "You said you wanted to ask me why they were moody. Why me?"

"Oh." She seemed surprised. "Because I always ask you when I don't know these things. You're the one who knows." She grinned. "You're my 'go-to' guy."

Shin did not have the faintest clue why this fact both pleased and irritated him.

On Friday, Maruyama was back. And this time, he had brought the photo.

He produced it from his jacket pocket during a quiet spell, when the class was busy doing work set by Yankumi, and handed it over to her without bothering to hide what he was doing.

"I dug it out last night," he said. "You can burn it if you like. Or add it to your scrapbook."

One of 3-D's unofficial class policies was that as soon as something more interesting started happening in the room, all academic efforts were abandoned and their attentions re-focused on whomever or whatever was taking centre stage.

In this case, Maruyama and Yankumi.

She took the photo gingerly, as if it were a piece of rotting fruit. "Yeah. That'd be the scrapbook called 'things I never want to think about in my whole life ever again'." She put it in the pocket on the inside of her jacket. "How did you even get hold of it in the first place? I don't remember you having a camera that night…" An unpleasant smirk tugged her lips upwards. "In fact, you were otherwise detained for most of that evening, if I recall."

Maruyama's shoulders slumped. "That was not my fault. It was an honest mistake."

"Uh-huh." She grinned, leaning back in her chair and pretending to inspect her fingernails. "Sure it was." Abruptly, her eyes darted up to concentrate on her students. "Oi. Are you guys working or what?"

Twenty-five heads quickly bent down to their desks. Sawada Shin, however, continued to stare defiantly at the two of them. He met Yankumi's firm gaze, and raised an eyebrow.

She frowned, and jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the board where she'd written the instructions for their class work. Her head tilted to one side, asking a silent question.

Shin held up his completed answer sheet in reply.

She rolled her eyes, and pushed herself up from her seat, making her way through the gaps between the desks to the back of the class. "Give it here," she murmured, leaning over him and holding out a hand for the sheet. "I'm going to start setting tougher work for you. Your ego's going to swell up if you keep breezing through questions like these." She glanced at him. "You really should be in 3-A, you know."

He glared at her. "Well, I don't want to be there, so don't go interfering, okay?"

She seemed surprised by his vehemence. "I wasn't going to. I was just saying –"

"I know what you were 'just saying'," he hissed, "but I want to be in this class."

A soft smile played around her mouth. "You really do, huh?"

He slouched in his seat, scowling. "Yeah," he muttered reluctantly.

Her forearm came to rest on his shoulder as she bent down next to him. "That's because you've got a really great teacher like me, right?"

He pulled away, dislodging her arm and making her half-stumble forward. "No. It's because this classroom's the nicest. And Kuma's in this class."

She glowered at him, folding her arms across her chest. "Fine, be that way. You know, you don't appreciate me now, but some day in the future you'll look back on your time here and realise how lucky you were to have a teacher like me."

Idiot, he thought as she walked away. You don't really get it, do you?

He was interested in that photo, though. What could she possibly have been wearing to make her so embarrassed? The brief idea of 'nothing' fluttered through his mind, but he immediately dismissed it, forcing himself to concentrate on other – less dangerous – thoughts.

However, the subject came back to haunt him later on that day, when he went up to the roof for a nap and accidentally slept through the rest of the afternoon, missing homeroom and consequently putting Yankumi on the warpath.

He woke up when the door creaked open and she sighed loudly. "Here you are. Of course. I don't know why I wasted my time worrying about you being in the hospital, or lying dead somewhere. You're always here. It's a wonder you attend any classes at all." She put her hands on her hips. "Why don't you just sleep at home?"

He sat up and stretched lazily. "Because nothing makes me sleepy like being at school. Besides, you just saw me a few hours ago – why would I have been lying dead somewhere?"

"The amount of trouble you guys get into, anything can happen in a few hours." She slouched over to the metal railings, leaning against them and squinting into the sunlight. "You better go. I think Kuma's waiting for you."

Instead of leaving, however, he joined her, not caring that his arm brushed hers or that, at this proximity, he could smell her shampoo.

"So," he began, abandoning subtlety. "Let me see that photo, then."

She turned to gape at him, her hand flying automatically to her jacket pocket. "W-What? No! Why the hell would I agree to that?"

He shrugged. "It's not like I'm going to tell anyone else about it. I'm just curious."

She huffed and folded her arms, squaring her shoulders. "You're not seeing it."

"Fine." He changed tack abruptly, taking a moment to enjoy the shocked silence. "Tell me about Maruyama, then. What happened to him that Halloween?"

She glared at him. "You're awfully inquisitive today, Sawada. What's going on?"

"I'm just trying to find out more about my great teacher," he replied casually. "Since, you know, I don't want to look back and regret not taking this opportunity."

She was silent for a little while. He wondered if he had somehow offended her, and he was just about to tell her to forget it when she said quietly, "He got arrested."

"Huh?"

"Maruyama-sensei." She looked up at him, her lips twitching with amusement. "The night of the Halloween party, he… his friend asked him to pick up his girlfriend on the way to the party, so he drove over to that address and picked up a woman standing outside. Only, it turned out she wasn't Kazama-san's girlfriend at all – she was a prostitute. The police pulled him over, and he got arrested." Her face split into a grin. "He spent most of that night in a police cell until I came to get him. He was never charged, of course, but obviously it was still pretty embarrassing."

"I'm sure." Shin filed that piece of information away for a later date. "You don't strike me as the Halloween party type."

"I lost a bet," she muttered grumpily. "That's how I ended up wearing the – uhm. Never mind."

"It can't be that bad," he pushed. "What was it – a vampire? A ghost?"

She mumbled something under her breath that he couldn't catch.

"What?" He leaned closer.

"I said, it wasn't scary." She stared down at the yard below. "My outfit, I mean."

"Oh." He thought about this. "So, you dressed up like Sailor Moon or something?"

She rolled her eyes. "If it was just cosplay, I wouldn't care so much about you seeing it."

"Don't you trust me?" He summoned up all of his acting prowess to play on her weakness – a guilty conscience. He made his voice sound hurt and disappointed as he said, "I'd never betray your confidence. I thought you knew that."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her bite her lip anxiously, looking conflicted. After a few seconds, her hand strayed towards her pocket. She pulled the photo out, stuffed it into his hands, and walked away, putting a considerable distance between them.

Shin took one look at the photo and slumped heavily over the railings, shoulders shaking violently.

Yankumi made a disgusted sound in her throat and stalked back over to him, her shoes smacking angrily against the concrete. She reached over his shoulder and whipped the photo out of his grip. "Laugh all you want," she snapped, "but tell anyone and I will hurt you badly, understand?"

He nodded, and waited until she had gone before fumbling in his pockets for a tissue. His shoulders had not been shaking with laughter, as she had assumed, but because he'd been using unsteady hands to stem the sudden and copious flow of blood from his nose.

It had been a goddamn nurse's outfit.

A tight, white cotton blouse and a skirt which exposed more of her legs than he'd ever seen before. Her small breasts had been shoved up and squashed together, most likely with the aid of some fairly inventive underwear, and there were far too many buttons undone on her blouse. She was glaring at the photographer, one hand reaching up to tug the starched cap off her head, the other holding a shiny red lollipop loosely.

Involuntarily, he imagined her rolling that lollipop around her mouth, her lips sliding over it – and cursed as the blood flow became even heavier.

He was in so much trouble.

Author's Notes: Out of curiosity, when you visit the Gokusen section of FFNet, how many of you set the ratings filter to ignore the 'M' rated stories? I ask because there is likely to be some strong language coming up in future chapters (there nearly was in this chapter, but I changed it) and I'll probably need to increase the rating. I just want to know how many people might be affected by that.

Please keep your reviews coming!