DIAMOND GIRL

Interlude - Yu and Masayuki

走ってく背　送り出してやることで　俺は何を飲み込んでた？
By sending you off, seeing your back as you run ahead, I wonder what it was that I held back?

-- Sousuke Yamazaki, "Just Wanna Know"

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AO3 LINK: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2487854/chapters/5653997

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He was eight, had the world in his eyes, and Yu thought he was the most magnificent person she'd ever seen.

See, they were there because the Mikoshiba conglomerate always had stocks in pretty much every high-class educational institution in Japan, and Roman Academy happened to be one of them.

Yu had been sandwiched in between a five-year-old Mikoto and their father, a bunch of bodyguards behind them - Yu didn't known it back then, but this public appearance happened hot on the heels of the incident where one of their nannies had tried running off with Mikoto. They were in a private box way above everyone, her mum pressing an old-fashioned pair of opera glasses in her hands, one she had put to good use because it's all the better to look at the boy on stage.

He wasn't even the main character. Yu didn't even care about the main character, but she knew she should have - what with how the boy managed to drive out the interconnected threads of plotline from everyone he acts with, how he moved the plot along with nothing more than a confident walk and a voice deep as the freaking Marianas Trench. It's unfair. He could not have been that much older than Yu's seven years.

The boy didn't particularly look anything special - smallish eyes, dark hair pushed off his forehead - but his eyes are golden brown and when he laughs Yu's heart does somersaults in her chest and all he had to do was say his lines and she was done, she was absolutely done.

She vaguely remembered her mum dropping hints about someday wanting to see her act in a play, like she used to, before all the modeling and marrying her dad that happened. Yu was seven years old with her heart in her throat and butterflies in her belly, and for reasons she can't dare decipher she had looked at the boy and thought that if she had him by her side, she could make her mum really happy, she could probably wanna give acting a shot.

Time passed. Curtain calls, applause, bouquets. The show's over, auditorium emptied, and Yu's family was making their way down to the common exits, bodyguards following closely behind, Mikoto's hand in hers, until -

Until that one drop in time's bucket, when he looks at her, just looks at her, and sees her face.

Yu had worn her hair long, back then, dark strands falling down her shoulder blades. (She hadn't started wearing her hair in its usual short androgynous style, not until she turned fifteen.) She'd remembered contemplating whether or not to throw all lessons of composure and good posture to the wind, if she should lean forward to hide her reddening face behind a curtain of hair, but then - but then the boy had held her gaze, smiled, and gave her a flawless, picture-perfect fairytale bow, like the kind a Prince would normally reserve for his beloved Princess.

So later that night, when her parents fuss about her, asking her if she's sure about her decision - asking her if she's absolutely sure with wanting to risk too many things, just so she could go to Roman - she thinks about how reverently the brilliant boy had bowed to her, and says "yes".

==

"Never thought I'd see you here, Kashima." Masayuki confesses, later that night, left to their own devices as they moved on to after-dinner desserts - where their parents debated over the cost and grandeur of their younger siblings' upcoming wedding. Said engaged couple had been left gaping in their parents' wake; Yu had pulled Masayuki aside, to a separate table, and offered him coffee.