Controlee

50. Summer Days

Rule 117: Don't let your guard down, even if you think they're dead.

"When you sleep in class, are you actually sleeping?" She was meant to be doing the maths homework Ectoplasm had set them for the summer. Unfortunately, she was in an easily distractible mood. "Or do you just pretend to sleep?"

He was meant to be marking the pitiful attempts at an ethics essay a few of his students had actually bothered to give in on time despite him failing to ask them for it. Apparently these teenagers didn't know how to teenage. "What would I gain from pretending?"

"Convincing the class you don't care."

She answered that way too quickly not to have been thinking about this a while.

"Gaining intel."

"On a bunch of teenagers?" This essay was good, competent, but the writer got lost part way through, swept up in emotions that shouldn't have played a part in this.

"You're stuck with us for a whole year. The better you know us, the better you can predict the trouble we'll manage to get into." And they'd already managed to get into plenty in just a few months. "And how we'll tackle getting out of it. If we can get out of it." She wasn't stuttering, she wasn't having trouble coming up with the right words for the answers, it was like she'd gone through this entire conversation in her head beforehand.

He was going to have to mark the writer down. And when he said writer, he meant 'writer' because whoever it was had failed to put their name on it. "And that's useful to me because?"

"Then you know what we need to actually get out of it."

He suspected the writer was- He glanced up at Otsuka, going back over their conversation in his head with more care. "And that's useful to me because?"

"Because you pretend to sleep in lessons to convince us you don't care." When actually you do, she didn't say, but he heard it anyway.

His eyes narrowed. "I thought I did it to gather intel."

She smiled like she'd seen that one coming. She'd seen this whole conversation coming. Planned it out and prepared for it. It didn't seem like her. "You could do that working at your desk."

He hummed and returned to his marking. Otsuka went right back to her work and she didn't get distracted again.

***

"How do you have my teacher-slash-guardian pegged so much better than me?" She ducked under a punch that would almost certainly have knocked teeth out and knocked him back with a hit between the ribs.

He barely stepped back, and considering he wasn't even winded she must've missed his solar plexus. Damn. "Abuse teaches you to figure people out very quickly."

She dodged back, narrowing her gaze at him. "Don't joke about that."

"If I don't joke about it, what can I do?" He launched right into another attack, pushing her onto the defensive again. She spent most of these training sessions on the defensive.

"You haven't even-" She quit talking as he burst forward without warning, copying her fast and furious strategy. Only, that strategy was hers and not his for a reason. She could keep up with it. He couldn't. One sloppy hit gave her an opening.

An opening he'd given her on purpose, it seemed, when he had her pinned for the third time this evening, immediately after. "You've only had one conversation with him," she finished.

He smirked. "I'm just that-"

She bucked her hips, offsetting his balance. It made it easy to yank him down, allowing her to scramble to her feet. He lay still there while she breathed in the warm night air. Looking up into the sky, she found the stars blinking back at her and they were so beautiful.