ENTITLED: One Time, In College
FANDOM: Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun
LENGTH: 2,200 words
SETTING: Post series by about a year, Yamaken and Shizuku are attending the same university.
DISCLAIMER: Apparently, I don't even own a sense of self-restraint.
NOTES: WHY DOES THIS EXIST. I don't even really have that much of a preference when it comes to the Yamaken/Shizuku/Haru dynamic. I ship Shizuku/success. Yamaken is just, like, forty times easier to write than Haru. I'm not kidding. Haru is so hard for me. I don't even want to try writing things from his POV.
NOTES2: Guess who just opened a new word document and filled out the header for a Shizuku/Haru story.
SUMMARY: Yamaken continues to prove that his life can be nothing but a hapless tale of woe when the girl he vows to move on from thwarts his intentions in her typically oblivious manner. It is generally very frustrating. — Shizuku, Yamaken

"How long?"

"I don't want to talk about this."

"How long?" his roommate asked again, voice rising and shrill and just. Yamaken stuck his head under his pillow and moaned.

"I mean, all through high school, that's, wow, that's three years. I've never even dated someone—a quarter of that. And you weren't getting anything."

"Be quiet," Yamaken ordered. Or sort of just, pitifully moaned.

"So, let me get this straight. You love this girl for three years—three years!—and then you graduate and figure, time to move on. So you deliberately sabotage yourself and go to your second choice school just to avoid having to see her…and she ends up being in two thirds of your classes, anyways."

"Ugh," said Yamaken. It was one of the most eloquent and truthful summaries of his feelings he had uttered in his life.

"So now you have to see her all the time."

Yamaken wondered privately if it was too early in the school year to request a different roommate. Or to evict himself from the college dormitories so he would never have to look at another plebeian again. The later plan seemed decidedly tantalizing.

"And where is her boyfriend?"

"I don't know." Yamaken tried to imagine the most ideal scenario for Haru's current whereabouts. Possibly on a tiny ship in the middle of the ocean, with no current technology. The thought pleased him.

"I mean," his roommate paused, then thumped Yamaken on the shoulder, "My man, this is your time."

"Excuse me," Yamaken said, and heaved himself out of his bed and his appropriate level of misery for the sake of requesting a room transfer.

Act natural.

Yamaken could not last remember a time when he had experienced such agony. The chair he pulled out to sit in scraped against the floor horribly. Shizuku looked up. She regarded him for a moment with her large, calm eyes, and then smiled a little.

"I wondered if I'd be seeing you," she said.

Yamaken was absolutely, resolutely, unflappably cool. "You changed your hair. It suits you."

She raised a hand to her jaw line, brushing against the fine hairs that ended there. "I wanted to go shorter, but the stylist refused. She said if I was still certain, to come back next week, and she'd continue for free." She clucked her tongue, looking a little irritated.

As he slid into the chair beside her, Yamaken noted, "I was surprised to see you here. I thought for sure you'd go to Tokyo U."

"I thought the same for you," she said, with a soft chuckle. "I have some family in the area, and Kyoto was more affordable for me. And you, Yamaken-kun?"

Yamaken's mouth dried up. He remembered, far too late, that he was supposed to be avoiding her. "I suppose I just got lost," he said.

Shizuku raised her eyebrows, and then raised one of her hands to cover a smile. It was a new gesture for her, one he hadn't seen before. He wondered where she'd learned it from. He reached into his back and blindly pulled out a textbook, and by the same unspoken communication they had always shared, an easy silence fell between them as they turned to their studies.

Numbly, Yamaken fingered the corner of one of his textbook's pages. Was this it for him, then? He'd hardly seen her since a year before, when he'd confessed his feelings, and already they'd returned to their old routine. Hopeless. He was hopeless.

And happy.

Yamaken snuck a look towards Shizuku, as she frowned over something she was reading. He'd never forgotten her face in profile, and her new haircut, with it's curtaining effect over her ears and the hinge of her jaw, struck him as deeply mysterious.

He forced his eyes back down to his notebook, hating himself.

"Saw you sitting with that girl," his roommate announced, soon as Yamaken plodded back to his dorm. Yamaken put on his most silencing look, which had absolutely no effect. His roommate went chattering on, as Yamaken threw his things down on his bed, and struggled out of his shoes.

"Is that the plan, then? You're just gonna keep on using the quadratic formula as your method of flirting?"

"That was in high school."

"That's what I'm saying!"

Yamaken's temper flared, "No, I'm saying every idiot learned the quadratic formula years ago!"

"Well, you don't have to be so mean about it."

Yamaken dropped sulkily into his desk chair, reflecting on the many struggles he was forced to endure on a daily basis, for example: his parents demanding that he fund himself after turning eighteen, hence, the unfortunate necessity of living in close proximity to plebeians.

As Yamaken unpacked his study materials the next day, he reflected that his roommate might have a point. It was all very well to enjoy Shizuku's proximity in tortured silence, as he had been doing for the past several years, but he also had the suspicion that there were far greater things in life, and he was only a half-step away from obtaining them.

"Ah," Shizuku chirped, once she reached the same table as him, "So you are making it a regular thing."

"Actually," Yamaken said, with a rush of sudden courage, "I was just thinking about going to the coffee shop to study, instead. It's too quiet here, and I want something to drink. Can I get you anything?"

He cursed himself for volunteering as errand boy, rather than simply inviting him along. But a miracle happened. Shizuku tipped her head thoughtfully to the side, and then shrugged. "If you don't mind, I'll go with you."

She still ordered the grossest, milkiest, sweetest drinks on the menu. Yamaken, who had been drinking his coffee black since the day he turned nine, was appalled. But also sort of charmed.

"You still drink it black?" Shizuku asked idly, while they waited for her drink to be made. "I suppose it suits you. It seems so adult, so serious."

Yamaken smiled briefly down at her, "What about you? Are you sweet and fluffy?"

She shot him a nasty look, which evaporated as soon as her over-sized horror of a beverage was handed over. Her face lit up with quiet delight, and Yamaken vowed to abate his loathing of Frappuccino's, if even only slightly.

They took a moment to set up camp at one of the café's tables, during which Yamaken asked, as casually as he could, "I've been meaning to ask you, have you joined any clubs? Or are you too busy with Haru?"

Shizuku blinked at him, looking slightly confused, before she seemed to remember something. "Oh, that's right. I keep forgetting that I haven't seen you since our sophomore year. The truth is, I haven't seen Haru in a couple months. He's on a fishing boat in the middle of the Pacific, somewhere."

She thought for a moment, and then shrugged. "Well, whatever makes him happy."

"Oh," Yamaken said, and turned his face down to his textbook.

"I've been wondering something," his roommate said, as soon as Yamaken got back. "Do you even know what my name is?"

"No," Yamaken said shortly, and sat down at his desk with Great Purpose. It was time to launch a plan of attack. Banishing rival love interests to the middle of the Pacific Ocean could only happen so many times in a given lifespan.

"Oh, excellent. That's really kind of you. Here I am, giving you all this advice, which you clearly need, and you can't even be bothered to remember my name. Thanks."

Yamaken had a thought. "If someone you're in a relationship with goes to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and doesn't contact you for several months, does that mean, for sure, it's over?"

"Your girl's in love with a fisherman? Rough luck."

Shizuku's disgusting sugar-vomit of a drink cost about four times as much as his did. Yamaken bore this staunchly, even in spite of his recently impoverished status. There were some things you just had to do, when you were in love.

"I'm going to get fat if I keep having these," Shizuku said wryly, but she reached out all the same to accept his gift, with a pleased little smile. "Thank you."

"I wouldn't mind if you put on some weight," Yamaken said, obviously paying no attention to what he was saying, "You're very thin, you know."

Shizuku blinked. For a second, he thought she might have blushed. But then she changed the topic. "You want to be a doctor, don't you, Yamaken-kun?"

Yamaken sighed, and scrunched up his nose. "I don't know anymore. I was going to be, but my father wants me to study economics, so I can take over the family business. When I said no, they cut me off. I think they're hoping the shock of being poor will be enough to send me back."

Shizuku's eyebrows shot up. "Cut off? Really?"

Yamaken shrugged. Shizuku pushed her straw in circles, still looking t him curiously. Suddenly, she smiled, and his insides squirmed up. "What?" Yamaken asked, hoping fervently that he wasn't blushing.

"Sorry," she said. "I guess it's not kind of me, to get happy over something that must seem like suffering for you. It's just that—up until this point, I've always thought, you seemed so far away."

"Me?" Yamaken echoed, and struggled not to erupt into incredulous laughter. Shizuku shrugged, still smiling a little.

"I don't know. I suppose, because—I guess there were things you never had to worry about. I'm not saying that you're worthless or anything, I know how hard you work. I suppose this doesn't make any sense. Sorry."

She looked back down, and as she did so, her newly shortened hair swished forward. Yamaken, seeing this, decided once and for all that he was going to become a doctor, no matter what.

"So you've made absolutely no progress, is what you're saying."

"Do you ever listen to me? I just told you that I'm going to be a doctor. My mind's made up."

His roommate made a rude noise. "Great, yeah, that's fantastic. But this girl, man, you still don't have this girl. And at the rate you're going…"

"You don't understand," Yamaken said shortly. He did up his laces, and started snapping the buttons of his jacket into place. He had an early morning lecture, and it was going to be cold for a while longer, yet.

"You had better not saying something stupid like, how every moment you spend with her perfect and you don't need anything else. Because I will seriously stop respecting you."

Yamaken hadn't thought of it like that. It made a certain amount of sense to him.

"You're a good looking guy, you know. I say, either finish it, or move on. But don't keep hanging around like this, it's killing me to watch."

"Don't you think," Yamaken paused to check his reflection on the way out. "That once you've found the right thing, you've got to have it, no matter how long it takes?"

He stepped out, closing the door on his roommate's squawk of protest, and jogged out onto the street. It was cold enough now for his breath to turn to mist on the air, and he could spot Shizuku half a block in front of him.

He ran to catch up, and she turned at the sound of his footsteps. "Hi," she said.

"Hey," he replied, and fixed the straps of his bag casually as he could. "Fancy a coffee before class? You could try a warm one, for once."

She checked her watch, and then nodded. With a teasing little smile, she added, "I can pay, this time."