A Certain Loner's Protégé [Hachiman x Yumiko]

Y is for Yellow

Yumiko never thought she'd want this, never thought she'd want to get away from her clique. But here she was, sitting with them in class yet she couldn't get the thought out of her head.

It wasn't like she disliked them or anything of that sort, because she still cared about Ebina and her obsession with BL, she still cared about Yui's bubbly but airheaded personality, about Tobe always being happy and excited, and about Hayama's...huh? That can't be right, she cared about Hayama's...

Alright, she had nothing, and that surprised her. Maybe she wasn't feeling well. Yeah, she'd go with that. Nonetheless, Yumiko wanted to take a break, not only from her clique but from socializing in general. As much as she liked the members of said clique, things were starting to feel much too repetitive for her, to the point that she'd sometimes be able to predict what would happen before it even happened.

Tobe would talk about something enthusiastically, then Hayama would respond, causing Yamato and Ooka to agree with him for whatever reason. Yui would then give her airheaded response, which would be her cue to give whatever input she had before finally, Ebina would sometimes respond normally, but most of the time she'd talk about the guys of the clique as if they were a part of a BL manga.

She figured that it was probably just doing the same thing for a while that made her bored and need some space and that after the weekend was over she'd feel differently, but that wasn't the case. Weekdays and weekends passed and she still felt the same. After every week that passed, she started to feel herself become more and more distant from her clique. Frankly, she was tired of this dynamic and felt like she needed some space.

Though there were multiple things wrong with this though. Firstly, she'd have to either tell the clique why she needed space, which would cause more harm than good, or just distance herself without telling them a thing, and that would surely put a strain on her relationship with them. Secondly, being alone in class for days if not weeks would surely put her on the level of loners like Kawasaki Saki and Hikigaya Hachiman. He was probably the worst of them in her opinion.

The last problem was how she was going to accomplish the feat of being a loner in the first place. There were only two loners in their class which were Kawasaki, and Hikigaya. Kawasaki was pretty much out of the question since she was friends with Ebina, leaving only Hikigaya as a viable option.

Yumiko didn't think much of Hikigaya Hachiman, but she had to admit that his methods when it came to Minami Sagami, Tsurumi Rumi, and finding out Hayato's career path were surprisingly effective, even if said methods weren't respectable. She'd seen him interact with Yui on a few occasions, but she didn't think they had any sort of relationship, they were just in the same club together. Which meant the possibility of him telling Yui wasn't high.

"-Right, Yumiko-chan?" Yui said, breaking Yumiko out of her thoughts. Crap, she was too focused on her thoughts to listen to whatever conversation they were having.

Along with feeling increasingly distant from her clique, Yumiko had started to drown out whatever conversations they usually had while mostly still picking up her cue to respond. Unfortunately, it seemed like now wasn't one of those times. She just decided to give an offhanded response and hoped it would suffice.

"Y-Yeah, right." She nervously nodded, hoping that was a good enough response for her. Yui stared at her in confusion for a second, before going back to talking about whatever they were talking about.

She probably knew something was wrong, but just left her to her thoughts. While Yui could be very airheaded at times, she wasn't by any means dumb. At least when it came to her friends she wasn't.

She looked over at Hikigaya, who had his head down on the desk, and shook her head in amusement. Whenever she looked at Hikigaya (which wasn't often at all) he always had his head down, probably taking a nap. And she found it strange how he always seemed to not be paying attention, yet he still ended up with relatively good grades. Better than hers, at least.