Title: Riddle
Characters/Pairings: Haruka/Yura, Q-ta/Yura, and maybe even some Haruka/Q-ta, but only if you tilt your head to the left and squint really, really hard. (Well, maybe not that hard, but whatever.)
Rating: For Haruka's slightly dirty mouth. (Like two words, people, but let's do this, just to be safe.)
Notes: Occurs somewhere after the Press Conference of Doom but before the concert. Have had this sitting on the backburner for a good while, until I thought, hey, Haruka needs some lovin' right now. So here we are. Remember, reviews make me a happy, happy writer. Still very, very broke, but happy. So, please, make a broke college student happy!


Haruka can't exactly pinpoint the very moment in time when he stopped thinking of her as 'the girl Q-ta likes' and began calling her 'Onozuka' in his mind. He credits her with that particular transformation (and it wasn't an easy thing to do either, mostly because everything in Haruka's life spirals around and around that idiot Q-ta and there's nothing he can do about it, not even in his stupid head, damn it, because they're twins, irrevocably, irretrievably bonded, even when he strains and twists and yearns to free himself from the messy bonds that tie them, anchor them, soul-to-soul) because she's surprising. She's not particularly beautiful, not particularly smart, not particularly outstanding in any sort of way: she's forever awkward, bumbling and blushing and stammering broken, unneeded apologies.

Except when she's not.

It's a bit stupid, he thinks—she's transparent as glass and about as opaque as cement. A riddle topped with that mop of silk-fine hair and sprinkled in blushes that start from the very tips of her ears.

She shocks him with her ingenuity—and then clumsily stumbles into him. She's helpless—and then dazzlingly talented and she slips into her character and wears her like a tight chemise. And he sees it: he sees her gumption, her spunk, her strong-mindedness, even when she's sniffling in his living room (but, shit, he didn't mean to make her cry—she just needed to face up to that stunt her manager pulled and geez, he thought she could handle it because it's showbiz, babe, you need to toughen up, even when your heart is breaking into a hundred million pieces and look at that camera and smile).

She's natural, she's fluid, she's as moldable as putty in the director's hands, a marvel in front of the camera—and he thinks, then, that he wants her, just once, maybe, to look at him, and see him for him, not as a means to an end, not as Q-ta's brother, not as a colleague, but as a friend, and maybe even as something he can't quite admit to himself yet.

Because she's not particularly outstanding.

Except when she is.