The End Student {Target One: Academy Time!}

コールドプリンスタイム（パート2)! The Cold Prince Time {part 2}!

Screwed. Completely screwed.

The cold male had looked up when she had opened the double doors, with a face as impassive as ever, yet his eyes held so much emotion. He stood up and walked towards her, notebook in hand. "Fukuzawa-san. Would you care to explain this to me?" He showed her a page, and Setsuna gulped a second time.

"U-Um..." Setsuna stuttered, not knowing where to begin.

"Why did you entitle the last song on this page 'HAYATO'?" Ichinose demanded.

How did she end up in this predicament? How could she just tell him that she felt sorry for him when she tried putting herself in his shoes? Even back at Kunogigaoka, she was known among her peers to be a very sympathetic person, to the point that it seemed like she had merged with the person she sympathized with and feels his or her exact feelings. It was almost like mind reading, but it wasn't some secret special psychic power she had; it was just simply an uncanny trait she carried since she was a child that, yes, appeared psychic to anybody who knew about it.

And what she did "experience" in his shoes made her head and heart ache. His feelings were a bit... distorted. "Mixed feelings", one would say. But what she generally felt was frustration, as well as the feeling of being lost and constricted. Those emotions were particularly overflowing that she decided that she couldn't stand keeping this to herself anymore and wrote it in song form. For some reason, the image that came to her when she thought about Ichinose was a mask, hence why one of her options on the song's title was "Masked".

The distortion, however, caused her to not get his feelings properly. It was like trying to watch a TV whose signal was haywire. You'd catch glimpses of the current show every now and then, but never the whole thing before another glitch comes. She concluded that the cause of this was because Ichinose kept this strong defensive wall around him—it may leak a few of his feelings, yet never fully— never letting anybody get a proper read on him.

"Well?" Ichinose said, eyes trained on her. "I'd hate having to resort to this, but if you won't tell me, I won't return this notebook—"

"...Because it's about you."

Silence engulfed the room. "Ichinose-san, ever since the concert, all I've been thinking about was why you've been pretending to be someone you're not... All my questions had 'Why's in them... I know that it's none of my business, but I couldn't get it out of my mind. I swear. And I tried thinking about it in your point of view... I just felt... lost." She looked up at Ichinose seriously. "Ichinose-san... I thought that you must've been silently hurting..."

Those words had Ichinose snapping the notebook shut. The "clack!" sound loudly echoed in the music room and out the hallway. He heavily shoved the notebook in Setsuna's hands before walking out of the room. "I've had enough of this stupidity..."

Unfortunately, at the same time as he had walked out of the room, Setsuna was regaining her footing from the heavy impact Ichinose gave her when he shoved to her the notebook. As she was steadying herself, their arms touched, causing a jolt to come up Ichinose's arm. They stared at each other, Ichinose with eyes widened slightly, before he finally walked away.

It was in those wide eyes that Setsuna caught one more feeling from him.

'...Relief..?'

Later during the day in her dorm, she quickly scratched out all the previous titles repeatedly until they were nothing more than black lines overlapping each other, including the "HAYATO" one, and replaced it with "The Cold Prince" instead.

* * * * * * *

Around the corner of a block, a black car was waiting in the rain. Himura heaved a sigh and glanced at his wrist watch for the umpteenth time. Well, he couldn't blame his charge for being late, what with this abnormally long, heavy rain that seemed to last the entire day non-stop. But his wait came to a stop when the door in the back seat opened and Ichinose, hair done as Hayato, plopped down the seat.