The little snake (an inept description of him if there ever was one) was not far away.
It wasn’t long after they’d all settled in the sprawling comforts of the lounge that he opened the front doors and sat himself firmly and definitively in the doorway. The view was nice, the breeze found him regularly, and he could keep an ear on the goings-on in the next room without having to sit awkwardly in a corner. Sitting around the social table and begging for scraps of friendship and acceptance were Ishinomori and Sagaki’s jobs, not his. No, he’d keep his distance, his dangerous and unfriendly air, and he’d listen to them talk and yammer and laugh and hope desperately that one of them spontaneously combusted.
Or he did until he heard the noise drop out of the room and the stuffy silence of shock and confusion replace it. Then he was a shadow in the doorway of the lounge, head cocked curiously to the side and mystified smile cutting across his mouth as he swept his eyes over the room. Sagaki was standing between Oubai and Kondo, the top-heavy blond whose name he couldn’t quite remember was huddled almost protectively close to the smaller girl, and Ikeda was staring at ripped up bits of something murderously.
He crossed the floor with barely a sound, hope mounting in his chest with every step, and when he was finally close enough to confirm that it was the pictures he had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing aloud.
He took a look over Ikeda’s shoulder at the bits she was holding, face carefully set in an expression of amusement that, while incriminating, wouldn’t be nearly as damning as him trying to look innocent. He stepped away from the dark-haired girl, looked through the pictures as best he could, and then left just as plainly as he’d came in.
A moment later he scurried back in, took the picture that was least-shredded, muttered something like “damned useful” and walked back out again.
It seemed a little silly when he ended up sitting on the windowsill in plain sight and watching them, crunching on a candy bar.