"But I'm not the girl," Sato insists for the seventeenth time. Misaki shoves the little box of chocolate-almond-crunch pocky into Sato's hands and then gives them a comforting pat.

"Yes, but Asakawa is an idiot," Misaki reminds then seizes Sato's shoulders and spins him around, then shoves him towards the locker room door when it swings open, sending him stumbling towards a suddenly beaming Asakawa.

"That's my favorite!" Asakawa mumbles, squeezing his lacrosse stick fervently, and Misaki flees the room so that he can retch into the snow-covered bushes outside.

"Dammit, what the hell is wrong with you guys!" Tsukada bellows as soon as Misaki gets onto the field, and Misaki praises the wonder of Japanese space age microfibers that Tsukada's clipboard hasn't splintered into tiny pieces in his grip. "I just sent Asakawa to get you idiots, and now he's missing too?"

"You are aware what day it is, right?" Misaki drawls, channeling his frustration into cynical disaffection. "You are aware that your goalkeeper lusts frequently and ineffectively at your midfielder's ass roughly 37 times a minute on days that aren't explicitly about who is doing what to whose ass?"

"Don't you start with me," Tsukada snarls, looming over him, and Misaki eyes the clipboard, which is threatening to blow at any moment. "You're so clever, you can go get Tachiki!"

"What?" Misaki demands, jaw falling a little. "That's Asakawa's job! You're subverting the paradigm!"

"I'll subvert your paradigm if you aren't back here with my defenseman in five minutes!" Tsukada leans a little more into Misaki's space. "MOVE!"

Misaki moves, grumbling under his breath that it'll take at least that long just get up all the stairs to the roof, much less cajole Tachiki into actually coming to practice.

It'll probably take more than five minutes when there's a desk jammed under the handle of the door to the roof, and how the hell did Sato manage to get a desk in this stairwell anyway? Sato must've used a lot of effort and a good-sized freshman to wedge the thing in as well, because it takes Misaki yanking with all his weight to jerk it free, sneakers sliding on the linoleum and nearly taking a spill down the stairs the whole way back to the first floor.

Surprisingly, Tachiki is not ogling the girlie magazine when Misaki struggles onto the roof, sweating and hands covered in black funk from the bottom of the desk and swearing a blue streak. Instead, Tachiki is sitting cross-legged on the wide lip of an air conditioner near the edge of the roof with a huge box of chocolates open and half-empty in front of him.

"Someone gave you chocolate?" Misaki inquires, crossing his arms, and then scowling when he leaves black handprints on his jersey.

"Pffft." Tachiki bites off half of a chocolate and scowls at its coconut interior, then pitches it casually off the side of the roof. "Knocked down some freshman girl and stole it. Snapped her bra too. Then I laughed."

Misaki advanced close enough to steal one of the chocolates, and scuffs his foot against something. When he looks down, there is a little heart tag, crumpled and sparkly, that is still glinting 'ASAKAWA-KUN' pathetically.

Some days Misaki wonders if there isn't anybody in this whole school who isn't trying to deflower his best friend, but at least it explains why Sato felt the need to imprison Tachiki on the roof. He chews the caramel savagely as he ponders this. Tachiki cracks the next chocolate in half cautiously, finds it is another coconut, and pitches that one off the roof too.

Misaki grabs Tachiki's hand as he draws back with the third coconut, and seriously, he's got to be picking them out on purpose, and pops it in his mouth, enjoying the dark chocolate and the not-quite crunchy texture of the coconut.

"I like the coconut," he mumbles through his full mouth when Tachiki raises an eyebrow at him, then sticks his tongue out with the half-chewed mass on it. Tachiki picks up the one chocolate-covered cherry from the middle of the box, bites the top off it, then tries to stick the rest of it on the end of Misaki's nose.

Misaki squawks and bats at his hand, crushing the sticky syrup into both their palms, and uses his other hand to grab something that looks like it might be squishy and smash it against Tachiki's shirt. Peanut butter, it turns out, a good choice, and then Tachiki launches himself at Misaki and sends them both crashing to the ground, little black candy wrappers fluttering all around them like their own tiny loser parade.

They are both panting when Tachiki rolls off, blood from his accidentally-split lip trickling across his cheek to mix with a smear of cherry; Misaki has caramel in his hair.

Tsukada is going to kill them. Assuming that Sato and Asakawa have shown up instead of remaining in the locker room to take each other's virginity like normal people, in which case Tsukada, with no players to take out his sadism on, will have likely exploded by now anyway.

"Don't we have practice now or something?" Tachiki asks idly, flicking away a blob of chocolate that is melted to his jersey. Misaki rolls over to rise up on an elbow, seize a fistful of Tachiki's jersey, and kisses him just to shut him up.

Tachiki gives a pained grunt when Misaki runs his tongue over the split in Tachiki's lip, and Misaki cackles in his throat and does it again, harder.

Running down the stairs is a hell of a lot easier than running up them, and Tachiki and Misaki still have enough breath to jog out of the building towards practice. Asakawa and Sato have emerged from the locker room, Misaki notes as they trot over, and Asakawa is trying to hide behind Sato as Tsukada screams at them continually without apparently needing to break for air. Sato, like a good goalie, just takes the abuse stoically.

"And who the HELL," Tsukada waves something squashy and brown, and Misaki notes with a sinking heart that there is a similar streak across Tsukada's forehead, "throws chocolates off the ROOF?!"

"Is that…" Asakawa peers around Sato's shoulder, "coconut?" and Tsukada's clipboard goes CRACK.