The afternoon sun painted geometric shapes across Hikari's desk in Class 1-B, but her eyes were unfocused, seeing not the blackboard, but the vast, windy expanse of the rooftop. The teacher's voice was a distant drone, a background hum to the replaying scene in her head.
"Did you expect me to not help a friend?"
The words echoed, soft but seismic. Friend. He'd said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, as if it were an established truth, like the date of the Meiji Restoration. It wasn't a question. It was a statement.
A strange, warm flutter stirred in her chest, unfamiliar and light. It wasn't the fierce burn of anger or the heavy ache of loneliness. It was… something else. She pressed a hand discreetly to her collarbone, as if to calm the sensation. Her cheeks felt slightly warm.
Stop it, she scolded herself silently, staring hard at her textbook. It's just a word. But it wasn't. It was a word that had never been applied to her in the context of Sakuragaoka High. Classmate? Yes. Problem? Constantly. Failure? Often. But friend?
She thought of the way he'd sat there, not asking her to leave, not demanding conversation, just existing in the same quiet space. She thought of his small, real smile—so different from the perfect, empty one he showed the world. The warmth in her cheeks spread a little. It wasn't about romance; the very idea was absurd. It was the startling, profound relief of being seen and accepted. After years of being a solitary island, someone had built a bridge, and they'd called it friendship. The sheer, simple novelty of it made her heart squeeze and her face heat with a shy, private blush she was glad no one could see from the back of the room.
---
At the front of the same class, Kaito Sato's pen hovered over a pristine line of notes. He was usually a fortress of concentration, but today, the fortress walls had cracks.
His mind was a chaotic slide show of the past 48 hours. The grainy CCTV footage. The clear, two-handed shove from Yui. The protective fury that had ignited in him when he saw Hikari standing alone, accused. He replayed his own internal dialogue in that moment.
Logically, a part of his brain had whispered, there is a high probability Tanaka-san escalated the situation. Her behavioral history suggests conflict. The evidence of three against one is compelling.
But his heart—that steady, predictable organ that usually just kept time—had given a single, violent thump of disagreement. It wasn't a thought. It was a feeling, a deep, instinctive certainty that the narrative was wrong. That she was not wrong. The logic had crumbled before that feeling, and he had acted on pure, terrifying instinct. When he'd stood up, his palms had been cold, his pulse a frantic drum against his ribs, but he'd hidden it behind a mask of calm precision.
Then, the rooftop.
He had gone there for the silence, to process the fallout. When her voice had cut through the quiet—"Aren't you the star of Class 1-B?"—his heart had done that strange, lurching thing again. He'd expected her to maybe nod at him in the hallway, not seek him out in his sanctuary.
When she sat down, the distance between them felt both vast and infinitesimal. The instinct to maintain order, to keep his solitary routine intact, had warred with something else—a desire for her to stay. He'd focused on his lunch with intense dedication, hyper-aware of her presence a few feet away.
And then the words had just… come out. "Did you expect me to not help a friend?" He hadn't planned them. They weren't part of a logical assessment. They were, like his defense of her, an instinctual truth spoken aloud. The moment the word left his lips, he felt a jolt of panic. Was it presumptuous? Too forward?
But then she had smiled. Not her usual sharp smirk, but a real, warm, surprised smile. And in that moment, any panic vanished, replaced by a wave of something so warm and solid it stole his breath. He'd smiled back, and for a few seconds, the rooftop, the school, the whole noisy world had narrowed to that shared, silent understanding.
Now, in class, the memory of that smile and the echo of his own word—friend—caused a faint, unprecedented heat to rise up the back of his neck. He stared at the complex equation on the board, but all he saw was the image of her sitting in the sunlight, looking at him like he was a person, not a podium fixture. His heart gave a quiet, persistent flutter against his ribs, a rhythm entirely its own.
At the same moment, at the back of the room, Hikari turned a page in her notebook, her gaze drifting unconsciously toward the front before snapping back down, a delicate pink still dusting her cheeks.
And at the front, Kaito adjusted his perfectly aligned textbook, a similar, subtle warmth coloring the tips of his ears.
Unseen by the teacher, unnoticed by their classmates, separated by rows of desks but connected by a new, fragile thread, they both sat in Class 1-B, quietly, privately, and in perfect, blushing unison.
(End of Chapter 10)