Five Minutes

(Akane's PoV)

—

The lunch bell hit the building at exactly 12:47 PM, and I heard it through the classroom wall like a starting gun.

That was a sharp, clean detonation that sent the entire senior corridor into an immediate, low-frequency roar of scraping chairs, zipping bags, and overlapping voices.

Without realizing, my hands were already moving before the echo had finished dissolving into the ceiling tiles.

I had immediately slid my pen into its case with a single, practiced motion, stacked my morning notes into their precise, symmetrical order inside my folder, and then rose from my desk in one fluid, unhurried movement — because I had been ready for approximately the last eleven minutes, and the performance of casual efficiency was the only concession I was prepared to offer to the observable world.

One of my classmates, named Chiaki, was watching me from across the aisle with the expression of someone who had already accepted the futility of commentary.

"You set a new personal record," she said flatly, pulling her bento box from her bag with a significantly less athletic speed. "You were packed before Matsuro-sensei closed his textbook."

"I had everything organized from the previous class," I replied, my voice carrying its usual clean, unhurried cadence as I looped my bag over one shoulder. "None of your business."

Then, Chiaki gave me a long, patient look that communicated approximately fourteen distinct emotional frequencies, none of which I invited. "Right," she said. "Go."

I already knew that she was referring to Shin, somehow. I've heard her gossiping with her friends, talking about how "The most lesbian girl in the school fell in love with Kurone's devoted dog." 

That filled me with disgust, but I pretended not to care, like I always did until now.

Moreover, Kurone had left school that day because she told the teachers she was not feeling well. That was the most clever choice she had made during all these years.

Then, after giving one last deadly glare to Chiaki, I realized that I was already halfway to the door.

The corridor outside was flooding fast with the usual noon migration — the underclassmen weaving between the senior clusters, the council committee members moving in group... normal stuff.

I kept walking with a practiced, automatic efficiency, with my combat boots making their familiar, measured rhythm against the linoleum as I cut through the human traffic toward the east stairwell.

'Ah damn... Why am I so... flustered?' I thought, realizing I was moving as if I were in a hurry. 'Ah... right...' I then remembered Shin. I really needed to see him.

I quickened my steps until I had finally reached the (in)famous rooftop. The place that had now become our little refuge from the school.

That, objectively speaking, was a strategically optimal location.

I arrived exactly at 12:50 PM. 3 minutes.

As soon as I arrived, I set my bag down against the stone railing with a quiet, unhurried movement, settled onto the bench, and placed the bento box I had assembled at 6:15 that morning directly in the center of my lap.

Then, I looked toward the stairwell door.

...

It was closed.

The terrace was empty except for my own silhouette against the railing, and the distant, ambient noise of the courtyard below drifted upward on the warm afternoon air.

'Tch— Where is he?' I muttered, still staring against the door.

I waited.

12:51 PM.

The stairwell door remained closed.

I looked back down at my bento box and adjusted the lid by approximately two millimeters to the left, realigning it with the edge of the lacquered wood. Then, I repositioned it back to where it had originally been because the original position was correct.

12:52 PM.

My mind registered the following verified data points with clean, methodical precision: Shin had been working with Sora Fujimoto during the final period of the morning, executing a logistical task that carried a defined operational timeline for the festival committee. The printing laboratory was located on the second floor of the administrative wing. The east terrace was on the third floor of the main building. The transit time between these two places, accounting for corridor traffic density at peak lunch hour, was approximately four minutes.

He would arrive shortly.

12:53 PM.

A single, thin thread of tension had materialized somewhere along the line of my jaw, and I was acutely, irritatingly aware of its presence.

My leg started moving, and I kept tapping my feet against the floor continuously, like a tap dancer.

'Where the hell are you, Shin?!' I asked, still staring at the door while biting my nails.

12:54 PM.

The stairwell door was still closed.

I placed one hand flat on the wooden slats of the bench beside my hip. Then I lifted it and placed it back in my lap, because there was no purpose to putting it on the bench.

Then, without realizing it, I started to analyze every single detail of that moment.

Shin was four minutes late, which was less than five percent of the anticipated arrival window, given reasonable transit variance. And he was with another girl, a popular one. Someone who could easily steal him from me, because yes. I 'stole' him from Kurone, so someone might steal him from me too.

I was about to snap out, completely.

My mind started wandering about where he could've been, and with every second that passed, I became more and more nervous, until a second layer of discomfort stacked directly on top of the first, because the second layer was self-directed, sharp-edged, and considerably harder to metabolize.

I could rationalize Shin's lateness into irrelevance in under three seconds, but I could not rationalize away the fact that some ancient, deeply embedded mechanism in my soul had already flagged his absence as a threat.

In that moment, my eyes widened because I had recognized that mechanism.

I had spent the better part of all my years learning to identify it precisely because I had watched what it looked like when it ran unchecked.

My father's voice, dropping into a specific, quiet register whenever my mother came home from the faculty dinner forty minutes later than the agreed time — not shouting, not yet, something far worse than shouting, a cold, surgical quiet that filled every room in the house like gas filling a sealed space.

The way his eyes moved to the clock, then to her face, then back to the clock, reading the discrepancy with a calm, meticulous precision that made the air around him feel physically dangerous.

And the thing that had always chilled me most, even as a small child standing in the doorway of the kitchen in her uniform socks, watching the scene with a face she had already learned to keep entirely neutral — the thing that had always made the back of my neck prickle with a cold, deep dread — was that he had always looked completely justified to himself, after slapping my mother because he thought she was a 'cheating whore who doesn't respect her husband'.

He had never believed he was the one with the problem.

In that moment, I felt a knot in my stomach, trying to move my gaze away from the stairwell door.

'I will not look at that door again," I thought, looking away. 

But my body betrayed me.

12:55 PM.

The stairwell door opened, and the specific, familiar weight of his footsteps reached me before I had consciously processed the sound — a steady, even, unhurried rhythm that I had apparently memorized without deciding to.

I did not turn my head immediately.

I waited approximately one and a half seconds — a precise, unhurried pause that communicated absolutely nothing — before I lifted my eyes from the courtyard and looked toward the rooftop entrance with a clean, neutral expression.

Then, Shin stepped through the doorway, carrying the stack of laminated festival maps tucked under one arm, his navy school jacket sitting on his frame with its usual effortless ease, his dark hair slightly disheveled from the transit, and his face bearing the particular quiet warmth that I loved.

His eyes found mine immediately with a fast, clean, unambiguous contact that made my soul soften.

"Sorry, Akane..." he said, his voice landing in the quiet of the terrace with a natural, unhurried ease as he moved toward the bench. "I had a lot of work today... and Kenji showed up at the stairwell."

He then set the maps down against the stone railing, settled onto the bench beside me, and reached immediately for the bento box in my lap — not asking, not hesitating, but acting with the quiet confidence of someone who simply knew where he belonged.

Of course, I allowed him to take it.

Or rather, I let the box be taken, which was a different thing.

"Kenji," I repeated.

This time, my voice came out entirely cold, carrying the clean, flat register I used when processing information that I had not yet fully sorted.

"What did he want?" I asked, crossing my arms.

Shin set the box open between us, glancing down at the contents with the small, genuine expression of approval that he produced every time I did something for him.

"Something about the athletics department's perimeter layout conflicting with the vendor stalls," he said, pulling his own lunch from his bag. "He spoke to Fujimoto-san mostly. And... he seemed creepily different." He then scratched the back of his head. "Like... he was being formal, and he wasn't wearing his letterman jacket."

"Mm," I said. "Understood."

'Different... speaking formally... Well.. yeah. That's strange. He's clearly hiding something. I know that bastard too well.' I thought, clearly wanting to investigate further.

Then I reached for my own chopsticks, the motion smooth and deliberate, and began eating with a precise, unhurried rhythm that I maintained for approximately forty-five seconds before I permitted anything else to surface.

"You're still late, dumbhead," I said. "I don't like it," my lips forming a small pout.

Then, Shin looked up from his lunch.

The expression on his face was literally saying, "What?"

"Five minutes," he then spoke.

"Exactly. Five minutes," I confirmed.

Then, a brief silence settled between us, filled with the distant noise of the courtyard below and the warm, unstructured quiet of the terrace in afternoon sunlight.

Shin's expression didn't shift into apology or defensiveness. It remained in its usual, steady register: present, attentive, and entirely unbothered.

"Okay..." He sighed, smiling, "Is there something I can do to be forgiven by this beautiful Death Lady?" he asked, his voice soft.

'Ah, please... I can't stay mad at you if you look at me like this...'

Then, I set my chopsticks down with a small, precise click against the edge of the box.

"Cuddles," I said.

Shin looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who had expected this answer and was not remotely inconvenienced by it.

Then, without commentary, he set his own lunch aside on the bench, shifted his posture against the stone railing, and opened his arm in a single, quiet, unhurried gesture.

I immediately moved into the space he offered without thinking, fitting naturally against his side. My cheek came to rest on his shoulder, and a quiet warmth spread through me. Somehow, being this close to him felt right.

His arm came around my back, gently rubbing it, and I allowed myself exactly one full breath before the chaos in my head began to clear.

On my second exhale, the familiar, warm scent of him hit me the way certain old songs do, bypassing my brain entirely and striking somewhere deep, raw, and visceral inside my chest.

In the space of a single inhale, the tight, suffocating knot that had been winding itself behind my ribs for the last six minutes lost more than half its tension.

I kept my face perfectly still, my cheek pressed flat against the rough navy wool of his shoulder.

'Damn... Shin... I really can't stay mad at you...'

The rooftop was warm beneath us, the distant, bustling noise of the courtyard filtering upward like background static.

The afternoon sun hung low, spilling long, golden sheets of light across the stone floor.

Beneath my ear, Shin's breathing was slow, deep, and entirely unhurried, moving with that steady, effortless rhythm that belonged only to him.

It was as if the very concept of panic or rushing simply didn't exist in his world.

He didn't say a word.

He didn't ask me what was wrong, and he didn't throw out any of those gentle, probing questions designed to make me confess why I had been pacing this rooftop like a caged animal; he just stayed exactly where he was, his arm a solid, undemanding weight wrapped across my back, holding me close. He was just there. Real, solid, and entirely mine.

And that was the exact thing that terrified me the most.

It wasn't his absence that scared me. It wasn't the five minutes of staring at an empty rooftop or the heavy silence of the closed stairwell door. It wasn't even that old, paranoid reflex in my gut that had screamed danger the second he was late, long before my common sense could catch up.

What truly frightened me was how easily he broke through my walls and how little effort it took him.

The massive, heavy tension that had evaporated from my chest hadn't vanished because I had rationalized my fears or fought down my anxiety. It had disappeared simply because he had put his arm around me and stayed.

I had spent all these years building a thick, load-bearing fortress around my heart, and I had built it alone, out of stone and silence, so that I would never need to rely on anyone else to keep me standing.

Yet every time Shin breathed quietly beside me, he dismantled massive pieces of that fortress. He did it without realizing it, he did it without even trying, and I knew he would keep doing it forever, because that was just who he was.

And the dark, ugly part of me—the cold, calculating part that sounded exactly like my father—that part didn't dissolve so easily.

It just went quiet, retreated into the shadows. It allowed the sandalwood, the warmth, and the steady weight of his arm to push it deep below the surface for now.

It was like deep winter frost temporarily hidden by a flash of spring sunlight; the cold hadn't left the ground, it was just waiting.

It would come back. I still have his dirty blood flowing through my veins, and that's why I had to learn to control it. For Shin, and for our future.

The thought sat in my chest, quiet and heavy, while Shin's breath moved softly against my hair and the golden sunlight washed over the terrace floor.

I let the silence stretch between us for another thirty seconds before I finally spoke.

"Next time," I said, my voice dropping into my driest, flattest, most arrogant register, "five minutes of lateness is going to cost you ten minutes of cuddles. I'm setting up a formal penalty system."

And then, I felt the small, quiet vibration of his chest against my temple. Not a full laugh, but that low, secret frequency just beneath one.

"Noted," he murmured, his voice a deep, lazy rumble. "I'll make sure to remember it."

"You better," I replied, tightening my fingers slightly into the fabric of his blazer.

I didn't move an inch from his shoulder.

Somewhere down below, one of the festival banner poles fell over with a loud, metallic clatter, followed by a muffled curse from a second-year boy and a wave of collective laughter from the rest of the committee.

But up here, I stayed exactly where I belonged, my cheek resting against the warm wool of Shin's jacket, my breathing slowing down to match his, the heavy wire in my chest finally turning slack.

The quiet between us was warm, comfortable, and entirely free of expectations. It was the kind of silence that didn't ask us to be anything other than what we were.

I just let it run.

And beneath that quiet, in the deep, dark corner of my mind that never fully slept—the part that had learned vigilance too early and couldn't just unlearn it because I was happy—I quietly noted what had just happened.

He had arrived. He had stayed. He had asked for absolutely nothing in return for the safety of his arms.

And that was the only thing that mattered in that moment.

Then, I slowly pulled away from him and sealed his lips with a kiss, because yes. I wanted to.

After pulling away, with my hand placed between his jaw and neck, I looked straight into his eyes for a few moments.

His gaze was full of devotion, a sincere one. 

Moreover, Shin looked like the most handsome guy on this planet. He was... different. Someone new.

"Shin... have I ever told you that you're beautiful?" These words came out of my mouth on their own.

Then, Shin laughed and said, "Hahaha... I don't remember, to be honest," before pulling me to his chest.

But, in that moment, his phone started to ring.

*RIING RIIING*

I let out a whine of frustration before pulling away from him.

"Who should I kill now? Is it Sakurai again?" I asked.

But no. Shin's answer made my entire soul freeze.

"Uhm... It's Fujimoto-san." He said...