WakaSeo Week, Day 1: Insomnia. (Chapter) Title from Ribs - Lorde. (As for the fic title in itself - you'll know soon.)

His wall clock reads one in the morning. It's been a while since he hasn't fallen asleep right away after listening to a few songs, but unfortunately, it looks like tonight is one of those nights, where he can't fall asleep no matter what happens. The sounds outside, dogs barking, cars honking - each sound is so loud to his ears. It's not like that's ever bothered him before - usually, it's the still-open lights outside that are too bright, or the blankets are too thick or too thin - something like that. Trivial things. The sounds, he supposes, are just the new additions.

His hand is still gripping his phone. Maybe that's why. Sadly, he doesn't feel up to it to stand up and put it somewhere, or maybe charge it for the next day. So it remains there, beside him, on his bed. Probably down to ten percent. On a whim, he opens it and checks - the battery percentage reads nine. One percent worse.

But now that it's open, he figures he should do something with it. He tries navigating his way to his messages, just to check who he'd texted last, but he'd only had one eye opened and hadn't bothered to open the other. Plus, everything is just blurry right now. He should be sleeping, he reminds himself, but of course, nothing happens. His phone is still open. He might as well, right? Where the hell is he, anyway? These aren't his messages. Are they?

He taps something that looks like it could be tapped, just for the hell of it. The words Seo-senpai pop up on a dark screen, which is about the same time Wakamatsu really wakes up. He smashes the red end call button so hard, his screen should have cracked, then breathes a sigh of relief. Alright. So these are, in fact, not his messages. He sets his phone down somewhere on the other side of his bed and dutifully ignores it.

For about five seconds.

Wakamatsu grabs the ringing phone and pales at the incoming call. He answers it anyway, just to be polite. "S... Seo-senpai?"

"Waka?"

"I-I'm sorry! I must've woken you up, the call was an accident, I wasn't-"

"Sure, sure," Seo says on the other end, yawning loudly, before continuing. "I was awake, anyway. Don't worry 'bout it."

"You were... awake?" Wakamatsu's eyes flicker upwards to the wall clock again. 1:04. "At this time?"

"Couldn't sleep. You too?"

"... Yes," Wakamatsu says, now hoping Seo isn't actually planning on having an entire conversation because of one wrong call. "Normally I can sleep with Lorelei's songs, but I guess tonight is, well, one of those nights."

Seo hums, sounding like she's thinking something over. "Well, since we both can't sleep, and I feel like having an adventure-"

"Seo-senpai, no."

"-I'll be at your place in ten!"

Then she hangs up. Wakamatsu pulls the phone away from his ear to stare at his screen blankly. He wishes he could have the opportunity to lie down and sleep, but he knows he'll never be able to close his eyes against Seo Yuzuki - t-that is, he means he can't sleep with the incessant noise she's bound to make once she calls again to notify him that she's here. That's all he meant.

He stands up and changes out of his pajamas into a plain shirt and a pair of pants, for decency's sake, even if every muscle in his body is yelling at him to get the hell back to his bed, lie down, and ignore the inevitable phone call, but his phone is already ringing when he pulls a jacket over his head. Seo is yelling something that ends with "-and don't you fucking forget it!"

"Seo-senpai?" Wakamatsu is almost afraid to ask.

"Oh, Waka." Something makes a thud noise in the background. "Some of the alley guys. Don't worry 'bout it."

Wakamatsu is definitely afraid. "Well, um..."

She laughs- no, cackles. Wakamatsu feels rather sorry for those she lives near with. "It's a daily thing. No idea why they're still awake, though. Anyway, your house was this way, wasn't it? Mm..."

Seo goes on and on about the directions to his house and takes much longer than ten minutes to get to his front door with all the times she backtracks after taking a wrong turn (or two). Wakamatsu actually dozes off once or twice in between her rambling, but it's only ever for a few seconds, which is the worst thing, because if there's anything he wants at the moment, it's for him to fall asleep and stay asleep for the rest of the night. Sadly, he stays up, if only because Seo seems to sense whenever he starts nodding off and immediately raises her voice to something Wakamatsu is fairly sure wakes up half the country.

Then: "I'm here, Waka!"

Wakamatsu snores.

"Waka!"

He jolts off the edge of his bed and nearly topples onto the floor if it isn't for his quick reflexes. "S-Seo-senpai?"

"I'm he-e-ere. Do you want me to ring the doorbell or something? Where is your doorbell? Oh, is it this one-"

"No, don't." He sighs and tries to convince himself to stand up properly. Hopefully, Seo was only planning on something like a walk in the park and not visiting quarantined areas or something equally ridiculous. Right? "I'll be there, just please don't wake my parents up. They'll throw us both out of the house."

When he arrives at the front door, Seo is swaying on the balls of her feet, looking around like everything around them is interesting. The moment she sees him, though, she jumps up and grabs his wrist. Wakamatsu winces. "Hey, hey, Waka! There's this old abandoned house across the street where I live! Wanna go?"

"No."

She frowns, and it's a little unusual to see that on his senpai's face. Wakamatsu sighs, already resigned to the fact that his night was about to get a whole lot more... interesting. "Alright, fine. We're just going to look at it, and then back to bed, alright? It's one thirty in the morning."

"Ain't never stopped anyone before." Seo's frown melts into a grin, and she practically bounds away (presumably) towards where her house is, dragging Wakamatsu along behind her. Then she stops right in the middle of the sidewalk, looking around blankly. "... Oh," she says, after a little while, "looks like we're lost."

"What!?"

"Hey, don't get your panties in a twist," she says, turning a corner seemingly by random. "I'll just get us to my place the same way I got to yours."

Wakamatsu furrows his brow. "You mean by walking around with no idea on where you're going and hoping you get lucky?"

"Well, yeah. Pretty much. Hey, I know that house! I passed by it, like, twice trying to get to you."

In the end, when the duo finally manage to make their way back to Seo's house, it's already two in the morning and the blonde has been yawning sporadically for ten minutes. The moment she sees the familiar roof of her house, though, she springs up and a grin blooms on her face. "Hey, we're here!"

Wakamatsu is practically snoring by this point, but lifts his head up obediently and says something smart like "Huh wha?" Then, "This is your house, Seo-senpai? Make sure to get some sleep, it's really..." Yawn. "... really late..."

"What're ya talking about? We're heading over there!" She points dramatically towards an old, rundown house that looks like centuries of dust have settled upon it. "It's an adventure, didn't I tell you so?"

"... What?" he says weakly, out of lack of things to say. "But... But... what?" He doesn't even protest when she grabs his wrist (again) and drags him off (again) towards the dilapidated house. When they arrive at the front door, Seo is just about sparkling, while Wakamatsu is anything but. "Seo-senpai..."

"C'mon, I've been to this place hundreds of times!" She flashes him a thumbs-up, which does not necessarily make him feel any better about going into a house that looks like it could fall apart at any given moment. "Anyway, I think I did leave something in here the last time I came, so now's the perfect time to fetch it out."

"Can't I just stay out here?" Wakamatsu asks, even though he knows he doesn't have a choice anymore.

As expected, Seo says "no," and then promptly slams the door open. It's not locked, but even if it were, Wakamatsu suspects there wouldn't be much of a difference. In fact, he's seriously surprised the door didn't dissolve into dust right then and there. He steps inside cautiously after Seo's careless tromp, examining the floor for weak spots. He doesn't think Seo would fall through a hole in the floor or something (mainly because, as she said, she's been here plenty of times to know enough about the floor, and because she's too light to put any real weight on the floor anyway), but he's certainly not an exception to that. He treads carefully, just so he won't fall into the basement and break his leg or something equally painful.

"This is a dangerous place to be," he mumbles. He can't even see anything in the dark further than the blonde, with only the faintest of lights coming from his phone. (Six, seven percent?) Seo seems to hear him, but doesn't reply. After a while, though, he speaks up again. "Seo-senpai?"

"Mm?"

"What... What exactly was the thing you lost? I might help find it..."

"Oh, that. Some music sheets for club, I think." She ducks into a room, and Wakamatsu immediately feels the whole house gets darker without her presence, but Seo comes back out within a fraction of a second. "Not there. 'Nyway, I was hoping I could practice here, just 'cause, but I went and lost the sheets, so I never got to finish that song... it was a nice song, too."

Then she walks away and trots down a rickety staircase. "I think I was here, last time, wasn't I? Hey, Waka?"

He follows, however reluctantly. "Yes?"

"Anything interesting happen lately?" she asks. "On my end, someone left a box of glitter pens outside the clubroom dedicated to Miki, but when I gave it to her, she broke down and had to be excused for the rest of the day. No idea what got into her, ya know?"

"Er..." He tries thinking of something Seo would call 'interesting', but can't remember anything from the top of his head, except the last time she had rammed him over the head with a basketball. "The math test earlier today... someone asked for my answer, and the teacher caught him, I guess."

"Boring," Seo declares immediately. "But what'd you say?"

"Nothing, obviously," Wakamatsu replies, sighing. "Though he did call me 'Waka'. That nickname of yours is really catching on, Seo-senpai-"

Seo stops dead in her tracks and whirls around so fast and so threateningly that Wakamatsu instinctively tenses for an orange ball to the face. Instead, though, she just fixes him with a completely blank stare that leaves reading her emotions out of the question. Wakamatsu hesitantly lowers his arms. "What'd he call you?"

He almost replies with his full name, just so Seo would stop looking at him like that. But he can't lie, because that would be extremely stupid, seeing as he had very clearly just said the exact opposite of the lie a few seconds ago. "Waka," he says, after a while.

She frowns, and it's an honest-to-goodness frown - hell, she even looks angry about it. "You can't let anyone else call you that," she says, sounding remarkably similar to a petulant child. "It's my name for you, and no one else's."

"I didn't know you could own a nickname, Seo-senpai," Wakamatsu remarks dryly.

"Well, now you do!" She looks like she's about to throw a fit right then and there, but thankfully doesn't, because Wakamatsu highly suspects that if she does, the whole house would crumble down and they'd be buried under the upper floors. "I don't wanna share, aight? You're mine, and that's the end of it." Then she turns around and resumes her walk down to the lower floor - probably the basement.

Wakamatsu is about to sigh and head down after her and wonder how his life had degenerated enough for him to be following a person with questionable sanity down the basement of a dead house at two in the morning, and he does just that, but stops midway when he realizes what Seo had said. "Seo-senpai?"

"Can't hear you!"

"Seo-senpai! Hey, wait! D-Did you just say-"

She comes back up with a clear folder in hand, though it's laden with dust. "Found it," she declares, holding it up for Wakamatsu to clearly see. "Our business is done here, right? Let's go."

"B-But-" He sighs. He's not going to get any answers this way. "Alright, then."

Seo blinks at him for a moment, as if she's confused he gave up so quickly, but turns back around and leads the way out the house. Wakamatsu hadn't even noticed how horrible the stench in there was until he got back out to fresh, clean air, which he inhales hungrily. God bless clean air.

He walks Seo back to her house, despite it literally just being across the street, because leaving right after that would be rude. While Seo's digging out her keys in her pocket, Wakamatsu fidgets in place - what had she said? He supposes he could ask Sakura-senpai tomorrow, since she's Seo's best friend, but how would he even broach the topic? "Seo-senpai just said I was hers or something like that and since you're a girl and her friend, do you have any idea what she means by this"? Absolutely not, she'd think he'd gone mad after a night with less than five hours of sleep...

"Why're you still standing there?" Seo asks, sounding mildly amused.

Wakamatsu jumps. "A-Ah, uh, Seo-senpai-"

"I mean what I said," she says, looking totally unconcerned, though she's clutching her folder hard enough for Wakamatsu to start worrying about her nails. "You... well, your nickname's mine. I just like to make up the rest." She shrugs and, ignoring Wakamatsu's stammers and protests, says "goodnight" and closes the door in his face. A moment later, a click sound indicates the door is locked, and faint footsteps that eventually fade away.

The next day, Nozaki-senpai hands Wakamatsu Lorelei's newest song with some sort of pained expression, to which he claims excitedly. He follows through with his plan to talk to Sakura-senpai about Seo, though it's mostly just normal talk. "Though," Sakura says, after some thinking, "Yuzuki seemed to be working extra hard during club today..."

The next time I update: House Visit. (I've given up on bothering to write and finish a fic everyday, because school. Well, it's the thought that counts, right?)

Slacker, 6/16/15

PS: If you like this, do read Omega Zekrom's WakaSeo week entry as well.