Author's Gibberish: Well, here's another chapter! I'm really, really proud of this one, so I hope you all enjoy it. I'm going to make a quick not that NONE of the lyrics mentioned in this song. They belong to the bands mentioned, and whoever has rights to their music.

Anyway, thank you all very, very much. I love your reviews and critiques to no end! I hope you all like this chapter to leave another comment for me, since you all are the reason I keep posting these silly little things. Thank you for reading!

Tawnyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Get that? Nothing. I'm legally incapable of owning anything. In truth, my parents own me.

The piece of paper rested-menacingly, disgustingly delicate-on the computer desk in front of the very distressed looking Hitomi. A week of scheduled hell, now named school, had taken its toll and left no survivors in its wake.

Dilandau had come into the habit of not only leering, but also grabbing at her at the most inconvenient moments. It was disturbing and terrifying, but something about the way he grinned stopped her from trying to stop it. There was something not quite right about the school's new cocksure hotty, however, a few teasing pinches were really the least of her worries. She had much bigger, angrier fish to fry, or sucker punch-or, possibly, both.

The stupid, innocent sheet of what once had been part of a brutally mauled tree stirred in the evening breeze that sifted through her open window. A window that opened directly onto a view of her neighbor's backyard, and at the moment, a view of Van Fanel stretched across a lawn chair with an acoustic guitar across his lap and head set placed firmly about his ears.

Really, it was more like trying to beat and cook Shamu, except that orcas weren't really fish.

The twin teachers had come to a decision that the entire class was a bunch of snobbish children, and had assigned what they had dubbed, 'The Lamest Project in the History of Projects,' as a type of punishment. It was a project where one person must get to know their assigned partner, and create some type of thing that represents them as a whole. It was the same type of assignment that beginning teachers gave to classes when they really had no idea what they're doing, but wants to appear productive for the simple idea that a busy class was a learning class.

Really, the only thing the class was learning was that the lame, unknown person they were assigned to was just as lame and unexciting as they had originally thought, and that they were right in avoiding any type of relation to them. Or-if they somehow found the project bringing them closer to a person of extreme interest and personality-that creating a properly symbolic project that would not offend their new friend with its lameness was very nearly living next door to the impossible.

Hitomi had found that her luck was exceedingly poor, and had been assigned to King Shamu himself: Van Fanel.

Yukari's laughter was still ringing in her ears, and Hitomi fleetingly wondered at the reason she had not shoved one of the hot food-court fries into the track manager's eye. It would have been a salty and painful way of revenge against one of the worst best-friends in history, not to mention, it would have made Hitomi feel a heck of a lot better.

As Hitomi mourned her missed opportunity for sweet payback, a tune flitted though the window and she leaned backward in her computer chair to listen. She had to fight back a grin as the starting chords to the Foo Fighter's "Still" began playing and drew her toward the window.

Van sat-stretched out on the woven plastic lounge chair-with his eyes closed. His foot bounced, the knee bent up next to the other one, fully extended. His headphones were wrapped about his head and the radio-cassette player sat beside his hip.

The little piece of outdated technology really didn't seem so out of place when he was like that. So laid back and innocent of the changing fads and opinions, simply existing and plodding along through life without rush. It was just like him.

At the moment, he didn't look like a rock star in frayed jeans and band t-shirt. He was just her next door neighbor that liked to play guitar and laugh at secret inside jokes and sing songs when he thought she was asleep in her sleeping bag and act like a complete Momma's boy and run all the way home to pickup what ever Merle had forgotten this time and… and…

Make bets that left his best friend feeling broken hearted because she had to find out in the most public way anyone could ever manage to fathom.

Hitomi pulled back from the window, reciting a mantra that hadn't been repeated in quite a long time.

'I don't like him, I don't like him, I don't like him. I hate him.

Why do I hate him?

Because I like him.'

"Damn it!"

As her face made contact with the desktop, Hitomi knew that she was screwed. Painfully, irreversibly and terrifyingly screwed, by some sick part of her own mind that had somehow come out as a masochist.

It was the same part that kept dragging up that stupid event whenever she saw a morning show playing across the television, that same side that kept remembering just how his room smelled or how he always knew how to get her out of a funk or how his ears would turn red when he was embarrassed or frustrated at not being able to find the right words.

It was the same side that reminded her of the gut-wrenching comments that came out of some slutty girl's mouth, or how Van hadn't been able to lie-had never been able to lie-and say that, no, it was all some big prank. It was the same side that reminded her of the hopeless, pleading look he had given her at the Jr. High promotion ceremony, and how Merle had never talked to her after that one last fight.

Hitomi stood and clicked off the desk light before slipping into bed, trying to ignore the sound of Van's guitar as the song suddenly changed to something quieter, and his voice sang along.

"You left me hanging from a thread we once swung from together

I lick my wounds but I can't ever see them getting better

Something's gotta change

Things cannot stay the same."

She knew the song, Maroon 5's "Goodnight, Goodnight." Van had played it when he had done something monstrously stupid, or was too proud to admit defeat but too smart to continue the argument. Hitomi scrunched her face into the nearest pillow to stop the need to sing along.

"I'm sorry, I did not mean to hurt my little girl
It's beyond me, I cannot carry the weight of the heavy world."

It kind of made her sick.

"So goodnight, goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight, hope that things work out all right, yeah
Whoa."