9. Put It Behind You – Keane

"Hey guys, where's Honda?"

Instantly Otogi asked, nobody would meet his eyes. He looked around at Anzu, Yuugi and Jounouchi, but found himself looking at only a variety of profiles and scalps with bad partings.

"What? Did I say something wrong?"

"No, it's just …" Yuugi shrugged, but the casual movement was anything but casual. "Today's ... special."

"Huh?"

"We don't bother Honda on this day. We'll get together later, probably this evening, but today?" Jounouchi was better at faking casual. "This is his time, man."

Otogi was still nonplussed. This was the group whose motto of sticking together no matter what was the stuff of legend (and ridicule, depending on who you talked to). Something was definitely up, you could almost taste it in the air, but they were now advocating something other than happy-clappy-kumbaya time? "I don't get it."

Jounouchi shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away. "You're not meant to."

"Jounouchi!" Yuugi threw Otogi an apologetic look before chasing after his friend.

Otogi followed up with an intelligent, "Huh?"

"You only transferred this year," Anzu said, coming up behind him. "You were home tutored before that, right?"

"Yeah. So?" Otogi refused to look uncomfortable about only deciding to try regular school because it gave him a chance to study Yuugi before publicly humiliating him. Even more, he refused to look embarrassed about staying on at school, despite being a child prodigy who finished this level of education at age eight, because for the first time in his life he had friends to make it worthwhile. "Does the mutt suddenly have something against private tutors?"

"No. it's just that you never met her."

"Met who?"

"Miho."

"Who?" He turned. Anzu looked him straight in the eye, and not even Otogi could fail to see the raw pain in hers. Anzu had the most expressive blue eyes he'd ever seen, and right now they looked terrible.

"She was a friend of ours. She disappeared. The police never found her, but they're pretty sure she's dead now. Honda was really … he had the most massive crush on her. I think he may actually have been in love with her, but he never got around to telling before she was … before she vanished."

Otogi performed a few numberless calculations in his mind and hissed air between his teeth. "Let me guess – this is the anniversary of her disappearance?"

Anzu nodded.

"Damn."

"It's been two years now. Honda walks her last known path. I think maybe he thinks he'll find something. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. But we'll be there for him later, when he's ready. He doesn't like anybody seeing him when he's thinking about Miho." She tips her head to one side, her gaze assessing. "I think he'd appreciate you there this year."

"Me?" Otogi's enmity with Honda was legendary – although admittedly it was mainly over Shizuka, and this Miho chick threw an entire tool box into the works for that.

"Yeah. Today, of all days, we need to remember our friends."

A/N: This one kind of links in with The Friend That I Was Looking For, if you'd like to know more about Miho's disappearance, but I tried to make it so that it wasn't absolutely necessary to have read that fic to understand this one.