[center][img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/617914243760783381/866258589646323732/thumbnail_yuuya.png[/img][/center]"Yo."

Of course. Minato remembered now: a few minutes ago he had heard the grunty timbre of a bike engine, crawling into the school parking lot and then dying there, like a sick wolf unburdening the pack of itself; and if he was watching, he had also seen the single headlight, a knife slicing through the skin of the dark, also strangled with the same flick of a killswitch. He wasn't, however. Not now, not here, with the cooled summer breeze sweeping the roof, and the city in full resplendency, extinguishing the stars in its quiet-deathly halo.

They exchanged wordless greetings: Ishida's nod dipped downward with the weight of his mannered reverence. Yūya's snapped upward, inflated by attitude. Yūya snatched away with a spot along the wall. Liberating his shoulder of a bookbag's yokes, setting it aground, he had already betrayed its contents, for glass settled against glass and loosed a frail, inconsonant song. Condensation already melted from the bottles as Yūya lifted them—twelve in all, already bundled in their cardboard cliques—from his school-regulation vessel. It carried those things which taught him, and those which made him forget what he had learned, with equal aplomb.

While his hands roamed Hawaiian shirt and [i]bontan[/i] pants pockets for a pack and a lighter, his eyes similarly roamed: to the access door, unstirred as if frozen in shyness; to HVAC pipes, typically a perch for other, more solitary creatures; along the wall, where his was the only bookbag. Somehow, despite himself, the night had seen him early to this [i]rendezvous[/i]. And with that affirmed, finally his eyes could shelter upon Ishida Minato, and the goosebumps on his skin could understand, a little bit better, the climate of their souls, and the arcing in the electrical currents of their hearts. Ishida-san stood dramatically by the edge of the roof, and turned to pretend he had just been caught in a moment of vulnerable reflection, as if to be ashamed of a gaping wound for showing Yūya the stuff beneath. A moment choreographed, and then performed, perfectly. Yūya, content to play his part this night, also feigned surprise, letting a glance betray whatever curiosity, admiration, or envy it pleased as it flinched from Ishida like he was an inferno, too bright, too hot. Not all of it was artifice, however. Out in the mountains the distant city congealed into a puddle of light; but here, among the blood-throb of the city, they could be counted. Reconciled. Every individual streetlight down there, the brake lights on the cars, the [i]ramen[/i] shops' back-alley bloom, the apartment windows filled with alien, familial warmth: if each mote of light represented an enemy to defeat, Ishida was scheming his blackout. But at least in the mountains one was safe. Here, mingling his light among the others? Ishida-san's spark seemed just as fragile as theirs, snuffed with hardly a blink.

That's right. Yūya had to hate this guy, didn't he? If the hate wasn't instinct, then he had to learn it, accept it into himself. He'd have to reject this rejuvenating breeze, so that his most baleful fires could be stoked.

[i]Too easy to forget up here. Too pretty ...[/i]

... But for now, a cigarette. The flickering hiss of the lighter dyed his hand a watery orange, and then Yūya had added his own tiny spark to the city's blaze. His first puff fed the ember, which shrank away again behind a veil of brittle ash. Tucking the thing between his knuckles, he reached for a bottle and the opener next. "You want one,[i]「bosu」[/i]?" Yūya called across the distance.