Inigo grinned and pointed at Junichi, then at Hoge. "Hoge, this is Junichi. Junichi, this is Hoge — the girl I've told you about."
Junichi stared at Hoge with emotionless eyes. "He talks about you a lot."
Hoge met his gaze with equal intensity. "Good. He doesn't talk about you at all."
Junichi stood his ground. "Good."
They just looked at each other for a moment.
In that moment, Hoge was not just her everyday, drab, normal self. She was not the wallflower that had been years in the making. Hoge was the girl she was now becoming, a girl who got into fights and who didn't constantly shrink away and who gave blood, sweat, and tears freely to achieve her goals. She was her best, most overt, most stalwart self. When Junichi stared at her, he was seeing the girl that his best friend gushed about with the soft delusions of young love, and he was looking at her as a young man who was being groomed by a terrorist cell. When she looked at him, she saw one of Ini's criminal friends taking advantage of his good nature, and she was doing it as the fierce-hearted shinobi Marumaru.
Something passed between their locked gazes, but it did not make the journey intact. It warped in the space between both teenagers. It became transformed by suspicion, and by condescension. Then the night pressed on with Inigo's patient peacemaking, business was concluded, and Hoge eventually found herself in her little rented room all alone again.
She was laying in bed in her sparse night clothes that she wore to keep from overheating in her sleep. Her glasses were off, so the ceiling she was staring at was as blurry to her as she herself normally was to strangers in crowds. There was nothing on her bare walls to distract her thoughts. Her textbooks were put away with fastidious neatness. The evidence she had gathered lately was hidden away properly in two locations, with encrypted photographs already in her data drive as backup. Still, she couldn't quiet her mind. She couldn't get to sleep.
So she stared at the blurry ceiling.
'Junichi, Junichi, Junichi,' she silently fumed. 'Why was he such a big secret? Why was he so immediately on guard?' Hoge's fists clenched the bedsheet covering her. 'Who is this prettyboy to be hovering around with such ownership?' If he was a roommate ('Can Ini-kun even have those?') or a sibling then Inigo would have talked about him more. She didn't have a perfect memory, not like some certain annoying people who she had met recently, but she still had an unusually good one. Hoge had been combing through her memories for hours and she was certain - dead certain - that today was the first time she had heard of this Junichi guy existing.
And he had brawled with a convict like Mammogar like it was routine. Hoge's unfocused stare at her ceiling became a glare full of the fire of resolution. 'I'm going to find you out, Junichi. And if you're hurting In- any of my classmates, I'm going to use the world to grind you into dust.' She finally found something for the racing flywheels of her mind to latch onto. She schemed herself asleep.
Days later, a hazy figure is sitting like a gargoyle on the edge of an apartment building. It is early in the evening, but still after dark. The figure is Marumaru. Her buglike head stares unblinking down at the sidewalk. Far below, a teenage boy with black clothes, too many piercings, and a chip on his shoulder slips out from the building and stops at the end of the stoop.
He scopes out the street. He glances up at the sky for flyers. Marumaru might as well be invisible for how little she stands out against the concrete and brick of the city. Clearly spotting no threats, the boy pulls up a gray hood and shoves his hands in the pockets of his black skinny-jeans. He turns left and walks with purpose into the night.
'I should really get a grappling hook one of these days. Blackout has the right idea.' Marumaru runs and leaps between building roofs, fire escapes, construction scaffolds, and the other myriad perches of the urban jungle. When her target cuts into a tree-studded park, she's forced to grab onto a utility pipe and slide down it to join him on the ground. She moves silent as a shadow into the tree cover. Leaves crunch soundlessly underfoot.
Marumaru darts from trunk to trunk. She watches the slouching youth on the path. He watches the pedestrians that go by. They generally notice the sneer on his face and the challenge in his eyes and break away. Conversations pause when they approach him. A jogger crosses to the furthest edge of the footpath when she sees his expression.