"Fancy seeing you here, Yukinoshita-senpai."

"You took the words right out of my mouth, Isshiki-san."

As Yukinoshita stepped through the open doorway and into the room, an overwhelming rush of déjà vu overtook my senses. Unlike the eerily similar scene that had played out at the entrance to my house, however, neither of them appeared to have any intention of leaving this time. Yukinoshita slid the door shut behind her, standing between us and the only exit to this space; Isshiki, for her part, folded her arms and adopted her default smile as she stared her counterpart down.

The casual and unconcerned passerby may have viewed this as little more than an idle afternoon conversation between two mildly-affiliated teenage schoolgirls. Yet though I was nothing if not a seasoned observer of people, it didn't take an expert psychologist to smell the incoming trouble from a mile and a half away.

"I hit a bit of a hitch with the paperwork, so I decided to go see if the student council president had any bright ideas, although I didn't really hold out much hope for that," Yukinoshita continued, a frigid trace of caustic amusement tracking across her face as she spoke. "I was right not to expect any substantial assistance."

"I don't really know what you were thinking or why you couldn't just wait for us to come back, but I was just getting some help with lifting these boxes." Isshiki glanced over at me and tilted her head towards Yukinoshita, urging me to back her up. "Right, Senpai?"

"I've already heard you lie to him. I don't need you simpering and cozying up to him so he can help you gang up on me as well." Her gaze snapped towards me, and I was caught in the headlights of her glacial glare. "Let's go, Hikigaya-kun. Someone like her doesn't need – or deserve – our help."

At that moment, two conflicting desires flared up inside me simultaneously: the itch to get the hell out of here before I got swept up in the vortex of their belligerence; and the burning, unyielding need to have my rapidly increasing number of questions answered once and for all. It wasn't hard to see which one would win out. "Hold on," I said as Yukinoshita made to leave, evidently expecting that I would meekly follow. "What do you mean by Isshiki lying to me?"

Yukinoshita's eyebrows pinched together ever so slightly, though the rest of her visage remained cast in ice. "It's nothing you need to worry about. Come on."

"It is, though." With every word that tumbled out of my mouth, I could feel an extra spike of adrenaline coursing through my veins, pushing me forward somewhat against my will, urging me to carry on talking. I could only hope that my newfound courage wouldn't turn out to be misplaced. "Saying that Isshiki doesn't know how to do her job is one thing – and that's fair enough, too, at least from my perspective."

"Hey!" Isshiki pouted and punched me on the shoulder. "Aren't you supposed to be on my side?"

"But…" I went on, "it's another thing entirely to call her a liar straight up. Unless I know what the two of you were talking about yesterday… I have a hard time simply, well, letting that slide. It just seems like a bit of a duplicitous thing to do. Not that I'm saying you're a liar as well, though," I added quickly, in an attempt not to appear too accusatory. That addendum, however, soon proved to be of negligible utility.

"Yeah, that's right." Isshiki, never one to let a dumpster fire go unlit, tacked her untimely comment onto the butt-cheeks of my own statement. "You can't just barge in here and say something like that without explaining why. That's just plain bad manners, Yukinoshita-senpai."

Yukinoshita's eyes widened briefly, her shock and chagrin that the two of us would dare to stand up to her written in tense, twitching writing across her face. For a split second, I thought she might just unleash the ethereal powers she had been hiding from the world all this time in an explosion of permafrost that would engulf the room in eternal winter, transforming Isshiki and I into chilling, unmoving reminders of the consequences of standing up to the Ice Queen. Fortunately, no such eventuality materialized, and she wordlessly raised a hand to her temple, massaging it to calm herself before she spoke again.

"You're right. I'm sorry, I got a little bit ahead of myself there, and I spoke out of line." She paused. "But I stand by what I said, even if it's put in less harsher terms. You and I both know what we talked about yesterday, Isshiki-san, and it certainly wasn't that – not anywhere close to just that, anyway."

"Nothing wrong with letting Senpai into the know then, right?" Isshiki shook her head. "I don't get what all this sneaking around and being mysterious about it is for. If you're not gonna tell him, I am."

Yukinoshita stiffened noticeably. "Our conversation involved a sensitive matter, something quite personal to me and my circumstances. It was a mistake in the heat of the moment for me to reveal something like that to you, and I would expect some degree of tact from the incumbent student council president, at the very least. Surely you can manage that much."

"I knew it!" Isshiki nodded knowingly and clapped the sides of her arms, as though giving herself a pat on the back for figuring out whatever revelation had just been uncovered. "That's why you brought your club up here to help us – you were hoping to get on my good side, so that I wouldn't leak anything to Senpai in gratitude to you and your contributions. But then, when you saw me and Senpai leaving the student council room, you got worried that I might spill the beans anyway and ended up following us here. I'm right, right?"

"I don't know how exactly you gleaned that from what I said, but you're free to believe whatever you like." An unconvincing rebuttal by Yukinoshita's standards, which certainly said a lot about how near Isshiki was to the mark. Of course, that much wasn't lost on the student council president, who now emanated a close to magnanimous air; after all, she had Yukinoshita right where she wanted.

Throughout this entire row, I had been standing silently to the side, shrinking smaller and smaller with each passing second until it felt as though I'd truly become the insignificant ant Yukinoshita had always presumed me to be. Yet that didn't mean I had been letting the words sail from one ear to the other without at least giving them some modicum of consideration. Knowing what I knew, there was only a single possible "personal matter" that Yukinoshita might be alluding to, one involving a certain more mature, manipulative and Machiavellian version of the Service Club president I knew. What exactly that matter was, however, remained frustratingly elusive.

Two student council presidents, and two student council president candidates. The possible connotations and permutations swirled around my head, taunting me for my ignorance, extending countless red herrings as to the truth behind the veil that I followed fruitlessly into their respective cognitive dead ends. The noise both within and without my head coalesced into a burgeoning headache that pounded against the front of my skull, and I rubbed my forehead with an unwitting groan. Seeing this, Isshiki and Yukinoshita's argument trailed off, and they both seemed almost embarrassed as they broke mutual eye contact and stared away at something else. The abrupt and ensuing tranquility, however, was more deafening than anything that had come before.

"As callous as it sounds, I don't really care that much about your personal situation," I finally said, unable to bear the awkwardness any longer. "If you don't want to tell me, I won't lose any sleep over it. Just don't give Isshiki a hard time because you let something slip that you didn't want to."

I had sincerely meant well, even if my vocabulary was blunt, but Yukinoshita plainly didn't seem to agree. "That's your first worry?" she queried in obvious disbelief. "That Isshiki-san might be hurt because of my problems? How infatuated with her do you have to be to say that, Hikigaya-kun?"

"I'm not-" I swiftly summoned a protest, but I was cut off by an even more immediate interruption from the person beside me.

"How could you say that, Yukinoshita-senpai?" Isshiki exclaimed indignantly. "That would never, ever happen. No way. Not in a million years. He would never see me that way, and I wouldn't see him that way either. We're nowhere near each other's types, anyway."

So forceful and flat-out was her interjection that I couldn't help but feel a little let down, even if what she said was true to a large extent. In my haste to salve my bruised ego, I responded with the first words that came to my mind before I could even process what they were. "I mean, you don't know that," I muttered.

At that infinitesimal moment in time, that remark seemed like little more than an off-handed comment about Isshiki's baseless presumptions regarding who I might or might not be able to fall in love with. Yet as the two of them turned to stare bemusedly at me, the benefit of hindsight abruptly caught up, and with it came the realization of the implications of what I had just said.

"What… do you mean by that, Senpai?" asked Isshiki slowly, who had now clearly abandoned her usual pretense.

"I-I mean…" I stammered, my brain working in overdrive to pull myself out of the hole my mouth had just dug me into. "I didn't particularly…"

"What a surprise." Yukinoshita chuckled joylessly as she aimed towards me the most withering and disgusted glare I had ever seen emitted from any living being in my life thus far – which, considering the substantial number of such expressions I had been subject to, was no small feat. "I mean, I had an inkling that that might be the case, but I didn't really expect you to just up and admit it like that."

I took a deep breath and stilled my beating heart. If there was one thing you could count on Yukinoshita to be, it was to be reasonable, even to a fault. "That's… not what I meant at all." I said in as composed a manner as I could assume. "I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding something here."

Yukinoshita, to my consternation, remained unmoved. "Am I now? Firstly, you meet up regularly with Isshiki behind our backs, including going off to that inter-school meeting at the community center without even bothering to let us know. Then, the two of you come down here on your own and start fraternizing, and now you come out and say something like that. I think the logic follows quite neatly, don't you think?"

Such was the surety with which she spoke and the methodical fashion in which she set out her reasoning that even though I knew that she had the completely wrong idea, I found it difficult to mount any semblance of a reply. Instead, it was again left to her original sparring partner to take up the mantle.

"C'mon, Yukinoshita-senpai. You know Senpai better than I do, so you should know he's not the type of guy to get hung up on something – or someone – like that." Isshiki simpered. "Although he certainly looks the part."

"That last bit wasn't necessary," I said under my breath.

"Hey, I'm not the one with the eyes deader than your hopes of ever getting a girlfriend. Anyway!" Isshiki coughed. "That's not really any of your business, Yukinoshita-senpai. Unless you're the one that actually secretly likes him, in which case the logic would follow quite neatly, to borrow your turn of phrase."

"Don't count on it." Seemingly having finally tired of the hostile charade that had inexplicably unfolded in this tiny little storage room, tucked a significant distance from the rest of the school's early evening bustle, Yukinoshita spun around and moved towards the door, placing her slender hand on its sullen surface. "There aren't two people in this entire world that I despise more right now."

And without even one last parting glance, she was gone.


We eventually returned to the student council room to find Yuigahama, who had also completed her mission for the day. She was somewhat flustered, no doubt a product of her exertions in the assembly hall, but otherwise greeted us gaily as she always did.

"How's everything going down there?" asked Isshiki as I put down the boxes we had journeyed so far and for so long to obtain.

Yuigahama smiled. "Pretty well, I think. They said they'd be finished up by tomorrow, and the day after that… You know."

"Yeah." Isshiki gazed wistfully out the window, the shadow of her uncertainty falling from her bangs, fanning across her forehead. "It's the big day."

Isshiki's mind had every reason to be occupied. It wasn't just a day for the whole school to come together and revel in the coming of the holiday season, and all the concomitant celebration it brought along; it was a day for her on a personal level, too, a day to mark the completion and grand opening of her first major project as student council president. There had been many obstacles, and many stumbles to accompany them, but she – or rather, we – had staggered our way to the finish line in the end. All's well that ends well, indeed, even if the end had still yet to properly arrive – and God and I both knew that a lot could happen in the space of two days.

"Also, there's probably no point in my asking this, because I know I won't get any answers, but…" Yuigahama made a face. "What happened to Yukinon?"

Isshiki frowned, though she didn't appear particularly concerned. "No idea. What happened to her?"

"She just ran in here, grabbed her bag, and left without saying anything." Yuigahama gestured at a stack of sheets which had been left to rot on the frontmost desk. "Those forms aren't done, either. That's just not like her, you know. She hates leaving things unfinished."

"Well, you know her better than I do. Either way, these forms won't fill themselves in." Isshiki beckoned her treasurer over, and despite his crestfallen look and muffled protests, he was ultimately bade to do his master's bidding, slumping into the chair and staring forlornly at the pile of paper before him. Godspeed, Nitta. Should've picked an easier student council role, like being the vice-president.

I pondered the day's events as we packed up and made ready to depart. In the end, I hadn't managed to get to the bottom of what Isshiki and Yukinoshita had talked about yesterday, though the more I wondered just what might have been said, the more I had the feeling that it didn't really matter. Yukinoshita had her circumstances, just as Isshiki had hers, and just as I had my own individual issues to deal with. I hated when people pried into my private affairs via some misguided premise of superficial acquaintance, so the least I could do was to return the favor to those around me. Besides, knowing my luck, I would most likely blunder my way towards the truth sooner rather than later, in a place and manner in which I both least expected and least wanted to happen.

And, sure enough, I was not to be disappointed.

"What… brings you here?" I heard Isshiki say. She sounded nervous, which I initially put down to her worries about the upcoming event – that is, until I looked up at the doorway myself.

Yukinoshita had poked her head around the doorway. It was a face I was familiar with, but that, unfortunately, was where the familiarity – and the comfort – ended. Her long, flowing hair had been brutally cut short at the shoulders; her scowl had been turned upside down, culminating in a leer that instantly twisted my stomach into a knot, tugging frantically at my body and exhorting it to flee as I realized just who – and what – it was that had descended upon our school.

"Hey there, prez," chirped Yukinoshita Haruno cheerily. "You wouldn't happen to have seen my sister around here, would you?"