Facade

The Research

Another school day spent ignoring everyone. Saito just sat at the ground, eating his sandwich in boredom. He couldn't believe he used to find this pleasing. He was so bored.

The only interesting thing in school would be talks before the teacher came with Yoko. But that lasted about two minutes or so.

Maybe he could find Koiichi, but he didn't have the guts to do that. He found approaching people awkward as fuck. He just waited for someone to approach him, but no one did. Who would? He looked grumpy as fuck, and everyone in school considered him an awful aggressive kid that could kill you if you looked at him. To top it all of, half the school was betting he was a demon or half demon.

"Greetings, Saito-Kun!"

His eyes widened as he looked up. Standing there was Mitsuki. She had a bright smile on her face as she waved. He looked like he shitted himself.

"Oh, um, hi." He stumbled upon his words.

Why was she here? And why was she acting like nothing even happened?

"I searcher all over for you anywhere this past week. I was extremely worried." She plopped next to him.

"Y-yeah..." he was too dumbfounded and nervous to even speak properly.

"Why haven't you been arriving at our lunch table recently?" Mitsuki asked worriedly, coming closer to him.

He moved away a bit and blushed.

"Uh, well, since that Saturday and... Yeah..." he got even more flustered.

"What about it was so special to ignore me?" she asked innocently.

"But isn't this awkward?" he gulped as he really wanted to get the fuck away.

"Why would it be so? Just because I don't love you that much doesn't mean we aren't friends." She smiled brightly.

That sentence sounded so weird. Couldn't she just construct it a bit better?

"I-I guess..." he looked down in shame.

"Since we both have friendly love to some extent." She explained.

Mitsuki was smart in her own way. Just that that way wasn't really useful.

"You're right." Saito stated and looked at her.

Realistically, if she didn't find this weird, why would he? He didn't want to ignore half of his friends just because he feels weird and is too much of a pussy to see his unrequited crush. He concluded that it was stupid to keep ignoring his friends.

"So, do you want to accompany me to our usual dining spot?" she questioned.

He nodded happily and followed her to their usual table.

Yui was sitting there, chatting with Yoko. She made an effort to get Toshiki in the conversation, but he just gave one word answers or just blankly stared. Saito missed that.

"Well, if it isn't Akiyama!" Yoko yelled.

She didn't look even bothered. She looked even happy to see him.

"Hello to you too, Taruhako." He grinned at her and sat down across her.

"I missed your sass, I have no one to argue with." Yoko said playfully.

"Same, there's no one to defeat." Saito smirked.

"Oh, defeat you say? Even though I'm the one who fucking wins every time." She gave a smirk back, obviously happy that this snark-off was happening.

"Nope. I think I'm obviously the smarter one here." He crossed his arms and leaned on the desk.

"Oh, but you're the one that has a C in fucking art." Yoko snarked at him.

"Here we go again..." Yui rolled her eyes, but she couldn't hide the small smile she had.

Things were slowly returning to how they originally were. Talking, joking around, arguing...

"Ah, which reminds me..." Yui remembered.

"Would you like to go with us to help kids in the orphanage tomorrow?" Yui asked Saito.

"Huh? I don't think I'd be of too much help..." he said sheepishly.

The only thing he was good at was carrying huge boxes, everything else he could easily screw up.

"You could cook them something delicious. I'm sure the children would like it." Mitsuki spoke up.

He blushed at the compliment.

"Its kind of a tradition between us. Ah, Toshiki should explain it." Yoko looked at him, trying to get him involved.

"When they first adopted Haru his first wish was to help the kids in that specific orphanage. He was quite attached to it, since he lived there before." Toshiki explained emotionlessly.

Oh... So it was a tradition that Haru started.

"We do it every two months, and since he isn't here with us, we decided to continue the tradition for him." Yui said, her voice getting a bit sad.

"But, I wasn't part of the tradition before..." Saito mumbled, feeling like he was imposing on something.

"I think you're a part of our group now. You can join in on our traditions then." Yoko punched his arm lightly, giving him an assuring smile.

He looked confused for a bit, but he still smiled afterwards. He felt accepted again. That was a nice feeling.

As he went to another one of his class. Math. Well, that he could enjoy for a bit. He sat down on his usual seat. To his surprise, Yoko didn't go to Yui, she sat right in front of him, and it didn't even ring for the class to start. He gave her a questioning look and she just rolled her light green eyes.

"As I promised, I researched about how to control yourself." Yoko whispered to him.

"And?" Saito questioned, getting intrigued.

"It was actually quite fucking interesting. I learned a lot about demons and their habits... Like, did you know that demons can't reproduce with other demons?" she looked quite interested in the subject, and her eyes were full of passion.

She also looked like the person to know a lot about random stuff. Saito meanwhile looked disinterested.

"No, and I don't care. Tell me what's important for me." He said in annoyance.

"God fucking damn, you're such an uneducated bastard." She snarked at him.

The school bell rang.

" Just get to the point." Saito demanded, looking less and less patient.

"Fine, fine. Anyway, I found out how you can halfway control your demon self." Yoko said, now deadly serious.

"Y-You can actually do that?" he asked in wonder.

"There are these pills that you take that calm you down... But they're seriously hard to get and illegal to top it." She said as she laid back on her chair.

"Fuck..." he mumbled.

The teacher went inside the classroom.

"I'll do more research, but for now that's all I have." Yoko said quickly and she turned around to listen to the lecture.

Well, at least now he knew how he could get what he wanted. Hiromi was out of the question. But there was one more person he knew that was connected to the west side. That was Miku.