The first bell of the new semester rang like a bright coin dropped on glass—clear, quick, and a little too early for Suki's soul.
"I protest," he announced, shambling beside Ryuzí up the stairs. "First day bells should be illegal. We deserve a ceremonial nap."
"You napped on the train," Ryuzí said.
"That was a power doze," Suki corrected, tugging on Ryuzí's sleeve until their hands brushed. "Different species."
"Mm."
They reached the third-floor landing, where sunlight filled the corridor in pale rectangles. A bulletin board wore new schedules like pressed leaves; someone had taped up a "welcome back" doodle of a cat in a school cap. Down the hall, Kenji was already holding court at the shoe lockers, telling Aoi and two first-years about a vending machine that only accepted coins from "pure hearts."
"It just ate your money," Aoi said, deadpan.
"Exactly," Kenji replied solemnly. "A test I failed."
He spotted Suki and Ryuzí and raised both arms. "The happy husbands!"
"Stop calling us that," Ryuzí said.
"Never," Kenji said.
Aoi's gaze slid past them, toward the end of the hall where the windows broke the world into four neat panels. A boy sat alone on the radiator shelf beneath the glass, sketchbook open across his knees, head angled so the light fell softly on his page. He wore round glasses that hid the exact color of his eyes unless he looked up—and he rarely looked up.
Haruto Kisaragi had been in their class for months. Somehow, he always felt like new.
"Morning, Haruto," Aoi said, casual as a shrug.
He blinked, startled that anyone had addressed him directly. "Ah—good morning."
"New term," Aoi added, fetching her book from her bag as if this were an old routine. "Don't draw on the new desks this time."
"I—never—" Haruto stammered, then noticed the ghost line of charcoal still smudged along his right hand. "I bring paper."
"Good boy," Aoi said, and walked on without waiting for a thank you, which is why Haruto whispered one—to the empty air she left behind.
In homeroom, the energy moved like a tide. Suki flipped his chair around and sat backwards on it until Ryuzí dragged it forward with two fingers. Kenji distributed contraband cookies with the flair of a benevolent smuggler. Aoi opened her planner with the calm precision of someone who had never missed a homework deadline in her life.
The door slid open. Their teacher stepped in, clapped once, and smiled. "Welcome back, everyone. New term, new chances to learn, and the same old reminders about hallway running, which I will deliver until I retire."
A sympathetic groan. A laugh.
"Before roll call," the teacher continued, "we have a transfer student joining our homeroom." The chatter dented, curiosity pressing on it like a thumb. "Please come in."
The door remained open for a heartbeat longer, as if the air had to adjust. Then a girl stepped over the threshold.
Her uniform was neat in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with school rules—crisp lines, ribbon tied in a bow so even it could have been measured. Her hair was gathered back with a pale clip; a slim notebook rested against her chest. She bowed, simple and practiced.
"Good morning," she said, voice low and even. "I'm Miyako Shimizu. I transferred from St. Aelred Academy. I hope we can be friends."
Suki leaned toward Ryuzí and whispered, "Fancy."
"Shh," Ryuzí said.
Kenji, who had been leaning back in his chair on two legs, thunked forward abruptly. His eyes, which normally found jokes in everything, found something else now—a focus that startled even him. He cleared his throat, tugged at his collar like it had shrunk. Okay, he told his heartbeat, calm down. She just said hello to the room, not to you.
"Thank you, Shimizu-san," said the teacher. He scanned the chart. "There's an open seat in front of Minori and Takeda. Second row from the back."
Suki elbowed Ryuzí. "That's us."
Miyako's steps were quiet. As she passed, Kenji tried to look like a normal human being who had not just forgotten what to do with his hands. He failed, dropped his pen, and then kicked it under Aoi's desk when he tried to retrieve it. Aoi watched this chain reaction with the serene interest of a cat watching a domino line.
Miyako set her notebook down, smoothed the corner, and sat. She didn't look back.
Kenji did not look forward.
Suki leaned around her chair and beamed. "Welcome to the chaos sector! I'm Suki, and this is my boyfriend, Ryuzí—"
Ryuzí stared at him.
"What?" Suki whispered. "Truth is beautiful."
Miyako glanced over her shoulder, polite smile held at the edges like a folded fan. "Thank you. Please take care of me."
"Done," Suki said, as if he had just signed a contract.
The teacher tapped the board. "Roll call. Try not to fail it."
Names moved through the room in a gentle tide. Outside the windows, a breeze elbowed the cherry boughs; a petal knocked itself loose and stuck to the glass with a soft decision. Aoi wrote the date in her planner, made a note to buy new highlighters, then glanced once to the window corner where Haruto sat a row over, his pencil whispering across paper. She knew the sound of that line now—how it changed when he was drawing from memory, how it slowed when he was looking at something real.
He was looking at the way sunlight fell on Miyako's sleeve.
Aoi's mouth curved, a private, amused thing. Of course you see light first, she thought. It's safe to look at. People are trickier.
When the bell released them for lunch, the room erupted into rearranged desks and opened bento lids. Suki swung his leg over the chair again and pulled his lunch closer to Ryuzí's like gravity insisted. Kenji hovered beside Miyako's desk with the casualness of someone who had spent five minutes practicing casualness.
"Do you—uh—want to eat with us?" he asked, words getting shoved into each other at the door of his mouth.
Miyako blinked. "If that's okay."
"It's mandatory," Suki said. "First-week amnesty program. No loneliness allowed."
"Program," Ryuzí repeated, dry.
Aoi slid her chair so there was space at the corner. "You can sit here," she told Miyako. "It's the least dangerous zone."
"Hey," Suki complained. "We're only medium dangerous."
Haruto had stayed where he was, near the window, lunch balanced on his sketchbook as if he might eat and draw at the same time and apologize to both. Aoi's chair scraped back. She crossed the aisle, planted her hand on the edge of his desk, and said, as if delivering a verdict, "Join us."
Haruto startled. "I—um—"
Aoi tilted her head. "We don't bite," she said, then glanced over her shoulder at Suki, revised, "He bites. The rest of us don't."
Haruto's mouth twitched toward a smile he was not quite brave enough to show. "Okay."
The table they made out of desks was a structural marvel: four pushed into a square for Suki, Ryuzí, Aoi, and Miyako; one tucked at the side for Kenji, who kept trying to be close without being obvious; and Haruto's at a gentle angle near the light, where he could see everyone and feel like he wasn't being seen.
"Bento swap?" Suki asked immediately, already offering half his omelet to Ryuzí with chopsticks poised.
"You negotiated with yourself," Ryuzí said, but accepted the offer and, in exchange, set a neat rectangle of Ayumi's tamagoyaki in Suki's box.
Miyako watched this transaction with quiet curiosity. "You two are close."
Suki lit up. "Tragically so."
"Annoyingly so," Ryuzí edited, a shade softer than the words.
Kenji cleared his throat, tried on an easy grin that fit like a favorite jacket. "So, Shimizu-san—Miyako—what do you like? Clubs? Curry? Cats? We can source all three."
Miyako considered. "Art," she said after a second. "And… walks."
Aoi glanced sidelong. "You should talk to Haruto. He draws everything he walks past."
Haruto made a small noise of dismay, as if his hobby had just been displayed in a shop window. "Not everything."
"Enough," Aoi said, unwrapping a pair of onigiri. She slid one to him without looking, like she had done it a hundred times already. "Eat."
He stared at the triangle in his hand, recovered, and smiled behind his lashes. "Thank you."
Suki leaned his cheek on his hand, watching all of this like his favorite soap opera. "Look at us," he whispered to Ryuzí, stage-soft. "We're a proper lunch club."
"Your measure of propriety terrifies me," Ryuzí said.
Miyako's laugh, when it came, surprised even her. It was quiet, but it reached her eyes. Kenji looked up so fast he almost headbutted his chopsticks.
"Don't die," Aoi warned.
"I'm fine," Kenji said, voice half an octave too high.
They ate. Conversation drifted in gentle, looping currents—Kenji's failed vending machine romance, Suki's plan to create a Bento Constitution, Aoi's inevitable veto power, the rumor that the festival would happen earlier this year. Ryuzí didn't say much; he never had to. He had a way of listening that made people feel like their words landed on soft ground.
Miyako noticed it. She also noticed the easy way Suki leaned closer to Ryuzí without asking, and how Ryuzí, without comment, adjusted the box so Suki could steal a pickled plum with surgical precision. Something in her shoulders loosened. Safe, the moment said. This is a safe table.
Across the desk, Aoi's gaze slid to the side, to where Haruto had set his sketchbook half-open, as if by accident. There were pages with studies of hands, quick gestures of shoulders, the curve of the courtyard tree. One page held the light falling across a sleeve—the exact thing he had just seen on Miyako. Aoi felt a little flare of something that she decided not to name. She rested her chin on her hand and watched him not quite meet her eyes.
When the bell sent them back into their rows, Kenji found himself walking with Miyako to the sink to rinse chopsticks. "If you ever need notes," he said, aiming for charming and landing somewhere near earnest, "Aoi's the best. But I can make them look cooler."
"Cool notes," Miyako repeated, amused.
"Illegible," Aoi translated, appearing at Kenji's elbow like a footnote. "Don't accept his."
Kenji clutched his chest. "Betrayed."
Miyako dried her chopsticks carefully. "Thank you," she said to both, and slipped back to her seat.
Kenji watched her go and exhaled as if he'd been holding his breath for an entire song. Aoi bumped his arm with her notebook.
"You're obvious," she murmured, not unkindly.
"I'm a mystery," Kenji insisted.
"You're a billboard," Aoi said, and returned to her desk.
The afternoon's lessons smoothed themselves into the kind of rhythm that makes a day seem shorter than it was: a timeline on the board, a set of questions, the low whirr of an old projector. Suki passed Ryuzí a note with a diagram labeled BENTO TREATY (DRAFT) that included clauses like No stealing the tiny dessert unless given permission and Emergency melon bread clause. Ryuzí crossed out nothing and added Ratified at the bottom in neat block letters.
Two rows up, Miyako took notes with precise strokes. Once, she turned just enough to pass Suki a handout and inevitably brushed Ryuzí's wrist. She murmured, "Sorry," with the automatic politeness of someone who had moved through many rooms full of strangers. Suki, who collected people like bright pebbles, whispered, "No sorry at this table," and faced front again.
At the window, Haruto tucked his pencil behind his ear and looked, for a moment, directly at Aoi. She had already looked away—at least that's what he thought. In the faint reflection on the glass, her eyes were on him, thoughtful, a small smile lurking like a secret.
When the day released them at last, the hallway yawned open with the relief of a long-held breath. Suki scooped up his bag and slung an arm around Ryuzí's shoulders in one unthinking motion. "Walk me home?" he asked, as if this were not a foregone conclusion in any universe where gravity existed.
Ryuzí tightened the strap across his chest. "You'll trip without supervision."
"Romance," Suki sighed, pleased.
Kenji hovered near Miyako again. "Do you—uh—need help finding your club sign-ups?" he asked, nudging his bag up his shoulder like it weighed nothing.
"I'm going to look," Miyako said. The smile she offered him was small, but it made his knees consider being unreliable. "Thank you."
"I can—" He gestured vaguely. "—walk that way, too."
Aoi appeared like punctuation. "We're all walking that way," she said, tipping her head toward the stairwell. She tapped Haruto's sketchbook with a fingernail as he slid it into his bag. "You coming?"
He stood quickly. "Yes."
They spilled down the stairs in a cluster that looked like any other group of friends and wasn't. Suki and Ryuzí led, arguing about whether umbrellas counted as fashion. Aoi walked between Kenji and Haruto, listening to Kenji's commentary without discouraging it, listening to Haruto's quiet without crowding it.
In the corridor by the club posters, students clustered around new sign-up sheets. Debate. Photography. Music. Art.
Miyako paused at the art table. Haruto did, too, two steps behind her. Aoi watched the space between them like a scientist watching a hypothesis begin to breathe.
Suki tugged Ryuzí toward the exit. "If we run," he said, conspiratorial, "we can beat the after-school snack line."
"We are not running," Ryuzí said, adjusting the strap on Suki's bag because Suki never did.
"Then we'll stroll with purpose," Suki said, lacing their fingers as naturally as opening a door.
Outside, the air had that early-spring brightness that made even the sidewalks look like they'd been repainted. The world smelled faintly of chalk and sun-warmed concrete. Suki leaned his head against Ryuzí's shoulder as they crossed the courtyard.
"New term," he murmured.
"Mm."
"New people."
"Mm."
Suki tipped his face up. "Same us."
Ryuzí glanced down, the corner of his mouth softening in that way that made Suki feel like he'd won something important without knowing what contest he'd entered. "Same us," he agreed.
Behind them, inside the school's long bright windows, Kenji was making Miyako laugh again without being sure how he'd done it, and Haruto was writing his name on a sign-up sheet with careful letters, and Aoi was watching him from the shadow of the doorframe with a smile that looked suspiciously like a plan.
The bell in the teachers' office chimed the hour. The day turned its page. And everything—old, new, and quietly in-between—moved forward together.