The Call

(Akane's PoV)

—

As soon as I heard that idol's name, something just snapped, and I felt my fingers twitching unvoluntarily.

In that moment, Shin didn't answer immediately. 

He just looked at me for a moment, letting the phone ring, like he was searching for some sort of "permission".

I held his gaze for exactly two seconds before the weight of it became mildly intolerable, and then let out a slow, controlled sigh through my nose.

"Do as you wish," I said flatly, turning my face away and propping my elbow on my own thigh, dropping my chin into my palm.

Then, I stared out at the railing with the expression of someone who was absolutely, completely unbothered.

"Uhm... okay," Shin said, with a clearly confused tone of voice.

"Tch—"

I heard him shift beside me, the soft tap of his thumb against the screen as he accepted the call and set it to speaker.

"Yes?" He said cordially.

"Ishikawa-san." Sora Fujimoto's voice came through almost immediately, clean and clear, carrying that particular warm, professional cadence that she seemed to produce effortlessly regardless of context. "You still have the materials with you, right?"

"Yeah," Shin said. "Why?"

"Mh... Sorry to disturb you during lunchtime, but I need you to bring everything to the teachers' lounge as soon as possible. I'm waiting for you there." A brief pause. "I owe you a favor."

In that moment, something tightened in my jaw, but I didn't move. I just kept my chin in my palm and my eyes fixed on the middle distance, watching a pigeon land on the stone railing with the focused, neutral attention of someone who found pigeons deeply fascinating.

Of course, I did not find pigeons fascinating.

The way they spoke... that was the thing.

Not the words themselves, because the words were perfectly, irritatingly innocent.

It was the texture of it. The ease. The natural, frictionless warmth of two people who had apparently developed a comfortable shorthand in the space of a single morning, moving through a conversation with the relaxed fluency of people who already knew they liked each other.

'I owe you a favor.'

I pressed my molars together very 'gently'. 

'Why am I feeling so bothered?'

My fingers had found the fabric of my skirt over my thigh without me deciding to put them there, and I became aware — with a cold, sharp clarity — that my nails were digging in.

Not enough to break skin, but enough to feel a small, controlled pressure that I was applying deliberately, with focused precision, as a direct alternative to the other things my hands wanted to do.

Like reach over and end the call, or like take the phone from his hands entirely and say, in my clearest, most pleasant voice, 'Shin is busy right now. He'll drop the materials at the door. Goodbye.'

Sadly, I did not do this. I couldn't, because if I did, I wouldn't have been any different from Kurone.

I just sat exactly where I was, watching the pigeon on the railing with an expression of serene indifference that I was reasonably confident looked convincing from the outside.

Then, the conversation continued above my head, Shin's voice easy and agreeable, while Sora's voice was warm and organized. The two of them were moving through the logistics with a cooperative, unhurried efficiency that made something behind my ribs feel uncomfortably tight.

It wasn't even a long call. Objectively, it was a brief, perfectly reasonable exchange between two people coordinating a school task.

That was, in fact, the most aggravating part.

Then, Sora's voice shifted slightly — just a fraction warmer, just a shade softer than strict professionalism required.

"Thank you so much, Ishikawa-san. You're incredibly kind. I promise I'll return the favor."

After those words, the line went quiet, and for a moment, I said absolutely nothing.

I just sat with that sentence — you're incredibly kind, I promise I'll return the favor — and I turned it over in my hands the way you turn over a smooth stone, examining it from every angle, and I tried to locate the specific, rational reason why it had landed in my chest the way it had.

I couldn't find one.

What I found instead was a gut-level, wordless certainty that had nothing to do with rationality. 

'She is going to try something. That's for sure.'

Maybe I was just overthinking, but I still had an entire life experience of reading people with the specific, finely calibrated radar of someone who had grown up in a house where you learned very quickly to detect shifts in the emotional weather before they became dangerous.

And every single antenna I possessed was currently pointed in one direction.

Then, Shin lowered the phone, and I immediately lifted my face from my palm, turned toward him, and wrapped both arms around his torso with the smooth, decisive efficiency of someone who had made a choice and was fully committed to it.

I tucked my head against his chest, pulling his chin down to rest on top of me, rearranging us into a position that was entirely comfortable for me and made it structurally inconvenient for him to move.

"I'm not mentally ready," I announced into his shirt, "to release you into the wild with that idol."

After my words, I felt his chest move with a quiet laugh — low and genuine, the kind that I felt more than heard.

"She's the student council president," he said. "I cannot defy her orders."

"She has parasocial tendencies and excellent hair," I replied. "The combination is statistically dangerous."

He laughed again, and for approximately four wonderful seconds, everything was warm and still and correctly arranged.

Then... his fingers found my ribs. And I perfectly knew what he was going to do.

*tickle tickle*

"Shin—" I started.

And he did it again.

"SHIN—"

The laugh that came out of me was completely undignified and entirely involuntary, a bright, helpless sound that I would have been mortified by if I'd had any spare cognitive capacity to feel mortified, but both hands were occupied trying to defend my ribs and losing catastrophically.

"Stop— AHAHA!— I swear— Shin, I will end you!"

And then, he finally stopped.

I pulled back from him immediately, breathing slightly uneven, smoothing my hoodie with the composed efficiency of someone who had not just been reduced to giggling on a rooftop in broad daylight.

"That," I informed him, pointing one finger at his face, "was a declaration of war."

"Exactly," he said, with the expression of someone who did not appear remotely concerned about the declaration.

"I have a very good memory," I said, my lips curving into a malicious smirk.

"I know." He said, pinching my cheek.

"And exwcewwent follow-twough," I replied.

"I know that too." He said, before kissing my forehead and releasing his 'grip' on me.

I held the finger steady for another two seconds, then lowered it with great dignity.

And then, Shin began gathering the laminated maps from beside the bench, stacking them back into their ordered arrangement with his usual, unhurried efficiency.

Then, he stood up, and I watched him straighten up and settle the stack under his arm, and he looked down at me with an expression that was genuine and slightly apologetic in that quiet way of his that never overdid it.

"I'm sorry, Akane, guess that our little moment of peace is over," he said simply. "I promise that I'll make it up to you."

I looked at him and felt that he meant it — that was the thing about Shin, he always meant the simple things he said, without decoration or performance, and it would have been very easy to just nod and let him go and spend the rest of the lunch period alone on this rooftop while staring at the pigeon.

Instead, I stood up.

"I'll come with you," I said, reaching down to collect my bag with a smooth, one-shouldered motion. "I'll help carry things."

Shin blinked. "Akane? You don't have to—"

"I want to," I said pleasantly, already moving toward the stairwell door.

This was true. I did want to.

I was not going to examine the specific reasons why I wanted to with any more depth than strictly necessary, because the outermost layer of those reasons — I want to help, I have nothing better to do, the rooftop is less interesting without him — was perfectly adequate and did not need any other explanations, which were less flattering and significantly more honest.

I was not going to walk into the teachers' lounge and watch Sora Fujimoto hand Shin a warm smile and another variation of 'I owe you a favor' from a distance of six meters when I could be standing directly beside him instead.

That was simply not a thing I was going to do.

And then, Shin fell into step beside me without further argument, and we moved through the stairwell door together, our footsteps finding their easy, matched rhythm against the concrete steps as we descended into the warm, bustling noise of the building below.

I helped him carry his things to the Teachers' Lounge.

The lunch corridors were still busy, and the noise in my ears was too much to bear. I was about to do a massacre.

I walked beside Shin with my bag over one shoulder and my expression set to its default, pleasant neutrality, and if I was positioned approximately three centimeters closer to his arm than strictly necessary for our 'travel', that was simply a natural consequence of the crowd density.

Then, after a few minutes of walking, we turned the corner toward the administrative wing, and the noise of the main corridor began to fade behind us, the linoleum giving way to the slightly older, quieter tile of the staff section.

That was when I saw him.

At the far end of the hallway — not inside, not near the staff rooms, but just beyond the building's side exit where the door stood propped open onto the external walkway — Kenji's tall frame was immediately recognizable even from a distance.

He was standing with his back half-turned toward the corridor, his posture was the same of when he 'visited' me in my sanctuary.

My blood immediately started to boil as I remembered Kurone's face when she told me about what that monster did to her. 

The urge to kick his balls and destroy his ego was too much.

He was talking to someone. A girl, to be specific.

And I could tell that she was not a student — or at least, not from our school.

Her uniform was wrong, the colors off, the cut different. She was blonde in the specific, deliberate way of someone who had chosen it carefully, her hair styled with the kind of high-maintenance precision that suggested she took it seriously. A gyaru, or close to it, the aesthetic sitting on her with a comfortable, practiced ease that said it wasn't a costume. My opposite. The type of girl I hate the most.

She was laughing at something Kenji had said, her head tilting back slightly, one hand coming up to touch her collarbone in a gesture that was either entirely unconscious or very deliberately deployed.

Kenji's expression, from this angle, was unreadable. But he wasn't walking away. And I knew him enough to tell that he was bored.

I slowed my steps slightly without meaning to, and Shin slowed beside me with the automatic, quiet attentiveness he had to my pace.

"Isn't that—" He started.

"Yeah," I replied.

We both looked for a moment longer.

The girl laughed again at something, bright and easy, and Kenji's shoulders shifted with what might have been a response.

For some reason, I had the feeling that bumping into them would be a bad mistake.

"Let's take another way, Ghost Boy," I said, my voice sounding more like a command than a suggestion. "I don't want to deal with assholes today."

Shin immediately nodded, and then we walked away from that.

I needed to investigate alone and leave Shin out of his sight.