It's winter and snowing and freezing but at the very least Chiba's hand feels warm. He looked down at gloved interlocked fingers, wondering to himself how he ever got so lucky. Before he's even graduated he's gotten a scholarship in one hand and a wonderful girlfriend in the other. He's surrounded by the boisterous laughs of his friends, because they're high school students after all, but her soft laugh stood out amongst the somewhat obnoxious sounds.

He tightened his hold on her hand because she's pretty much perfect. She's quiet and a bit shy but opens up when it's only the two of them. She has a gentle beauty that not many notice but upon closer inspection is undeniably breath-taking – her striking green eyes were so mesmerising he couldn't look away sometimes. She looked up to him, catching him staring and shook her head with a small smile.

To an outsider, it would seem like she was rolling her eyes at his smitten behaviour but he could see her blush. He kind of wanted to tease her, especially when she tried to hide her face in her hair. But then she was leaning her head on his shoulder and he wondered how he was so lucky once more.

Three years ago he wouldn't have imagined this at all.

The first time they go out it's summer and he's kind of melting in the heat when she caught him completely off guard.

"Gotcha." There's a blunt fingernail pressing into the back of his neck and he couldn't help but almost jump out of his skin. He was definitely not expecting that, he had to give her that.

He chuckled nervously, reaching behind and catching her hand, still in a finger gun, bringing it down as he turns around. He wasn't going to lie, it was a sort of bold move on his part, considering everything between was up in the air right now and neither of them were very touchy feely people in general. However, her hand was so small and warm, he couldn't resist.

"Hayami, I thought we agreed that this would be a break from assassinations." Chiba reminded but Hayami shrugged her shoulders, smiling mischievously. Chiba had to take a second to swallow because her hair was down and wow, she should do that more often (why did she even stop?).

"You should always have your guard up." She said, releasing her hand from his grip and poking him in the chest. "I guess this just proves that I'm the better sniper."

Chiba shook his head as she winked because for all that she liked to talk about it, there really was no competitive air between them. Their sniping competition of who-can-hit-the-bulls-eye-more-out-of-ten were fun and if anything else, a gateway to why they were out today.

Somewhere between the marksmanship practice and naturally gravitating to each other for class projects they noticed that maybe the comfortableness they felt around each other was more than close friendship. After all, the accidental elbow brushing and subsequent blushing and stuttering were a pretty clear sign for something at the very least.

"Say that when you manage to shoot Koro-sensei before I do." Because he had to. As nervous as he had been, he had never had to think so hard about his wardrobe before, he could hardly feel the tension in his shoulders anymore. Hayami had opened with their normal banter, shooting away any anxiousness the way she did with her targets – with mercilessly precise accuracy.

Embarrassingly, there was no other way to describe his heart other than it fluttered. It was somewhere between jumping out of his throat and just lightly speeding up because she makes things so easy. She understood him, looked past his silence and dragged his personality out of the shadows like no one else. There weren't many others that could sit with him for hours on end, the number of words said between them countable on one hand but she did. Several times a week, actually.

She's pretty much perfect was all he could think and the thought surprised him more than Hayami had when she arrived.

"I guess we'll have to find out when we go to that island resort for our assassination." Chiba was kind of listening but it was hard to when five minutes into their first date he'd realised he didn't sort-of-like-her-not-in-a-friend-way, he had the biggest crush of his life on her. He hardly caught what she said next because this was not a revelation he needed right this moment but now she was snapping her fingers in his face and it was probably a good time to pay attention. "Are you listening, Chiba? You're so out of it today. If you don't want to be here you shouldn't have agreed."

And there was another side of her not many people got to see (something he took a little too much pride in). Her tone was so cold and aloof but her subtle fiddling with her skirt gave her away completely. Hayami could hide her emotions almost flawlessly and her tells were few and irregular but Chiba liked to think he's been around her enough to see the slightest shift in her.

"I'm sorry, Hayami. I'm just a bit nervous." He wasn't one for making excuses usually but he couldn't really tell her he realised he is smitten with her. Besides it wasn't really a lie.

"Just say so sooner, idiot." She mumbled, stopping her fiddling as she looked away, slightly red in the face. Chiba made a mental note that a blushing Hayami with her hair down was something he wanted to see again. "Anyway, the movie is going to start without us if we don't start going."

Hayami started to walk in the direction of the theatre, probably expecting Chiba to follow, when Chiba's eye was drawn to her hand. Maybe it's the way she's swinging her arms or maybe it's the way she'd greeted him with her finger gun. Maybe it was a bit of both. Either way, he looked down at his own hand and tried to remember the brief feeling of hers in his.

He could do this… right?

"Chiba?" Hayami called out when she realised he wasn't following, raising an eyebrow at the way he was kind of staring at her but also looking lost in his thoughts.

"Hayami, can I… can I hold your hand?" When Hayami didn't respond after thirty seconds, Chiba thought maybe he couldn't do this. For once, they had a positively uncomfortable and heavy silence between them. It was so thick Chiba thought he might as well be drowning in it. However, before he could listen to his fight or flight instinct, which in that moment was telling him to fly to the moon Koro-sensei destroyed, Hayami cleared her throat, refusing to meet his eyes when he looked up.

"O-Only if you call me by my first name." Hayami was blushing all the way to her ears and that was definitely a first for him (a wonderful first, mind you). Her fiddling was back but it was a different kind of fiddling, the movements smaller and slower, like she was cooking in her own embarrassment.

Moving more by instinct than by actual thought, he pretty much ran to her side, trying to reach for her hand and missing horribly. His clumsiness prompted a snort and then a laugh, Hayami reaching for him instead, managing to hold onto his hand securely. It was messy and sweaty from the summer heat, their fingers were kind of intertwined but kind of not, but Hayami's quietening giggles and the softness of her hand made up for the awkwardness.

Realising what she had done, Hayami's giggles stopped abruptly, eyes focusing on their connected hands – not unlike the way she honed in on a sniping target. Chiba could practically feel her heart racing through their palms and stopped to recognise that it was his turn to gun down the tension.

"We should get going to that movie now," Chiba said as he tightened his grip on her hand, smiling reassuringly when she looked up from their hands to his face. When her expression relaxed and her own smile was curving at the corners of her lips, he knew agreeing to this outing was his best idea to date. "Rinka."

The way Hayami's face slowly went from red to redder and she started dragging him towards the cinema said it all. He could practically hear her saying 'it's not like I want you to call me by my first name' but she didn't need to. He could practically read her mind and the 'she's pretty much perfect' thought came back like a tidal wave. But then she tightened her hold on his hand and actually scratch that…

She was perfect.

So, there's not enough Chibahaya fics out there...decided to change that :3 Hope you enjoyed it ^^
It's also not beta-ed and I'm a shitty editor so erm... there may be some mistakes :P Buuuuuuuut~ I do have quite a few chapters written up so I'll probably be updating somewhat regularly... hopefully being the key word :P