"The poor have me, the rich need me, and if you eat me you'll die. What am I?"

"Huh?" A tall, slouching blonde grunts around the gum in his mouth, covering his confusion and embarrassment with irritation.

"It's a riddle." The whisper provides rather unhelpfully from the other side of the packed bookcase of the school library. "Do you give up? Come on, you didn't even try."

The blonde glares through the shelf but can't make out the person speaking to him around the thick records of dusty court most he can really see is that he is short and has black hair. Not exactly distinctive.

"Leave me alone." He hisses, walking deeper into the rows with his heaping stack of community service.

The smaller boy dashes after the blonde from his side of the shelf. "Nothing," he says quickly, a bit too loud for a library. "The answer is nothing."

"Whatever." The blonde growls, hunching his shoulders further, trying not to think of how obvious the answer was once he heard it. "Leave me alone."

"You're Heiwajima Shizuo, aren't you?" The small boy asks, whispering again.

Shizuo steps closer to the shelf and glares through harder, trying to intimidate the other boy.

"If you're askin then you already know the answer."

The boy on the other side doesn't back up like Shizuo was expecting him to. Instead, he steps closer in response - locking Shizuo's light brown eyes with his grinning, dark red eyes. The unusual color makes Shizuo blink, but he manages to not avert his gaze.

"Who are you?" Shizuo asks, not sounding nearly as intimidating as he meant to.

The grin in the boy's expressive, red eyes seems to twist. "Nothing." He whispers back, before losing Shizuo between a few more sets of bookcases.

Shizuo classifies the boy on the other side of the bookcase to be a total fucking weirdo and not worth another though.

He tells himself that he definitely is not staying in the library longer than usual because he isn't hoping see the boy again.