Days passed without Denki being able to get so much as a word in to you. Tetsutetsu had taken the remaining seat next to you, and most of their conversations didn't so much as take into account the fact that Denki existed, much less include him in the chattering. Each afternoon was one devoted to the agonizing empty space beside him as he walked home, each night to the lack of your texts lighting up his phone, each day to the enraptured joy that you held and spread to Tetsu, not to Denki.

He'd initially denied everything. You were known as a lighthearted and whimsical person, always striving to achieve the next opportunity crafted in your complex maze of a mind which so few could ever find the pattern to the key that solved it; frequently you had committed yourself to projects you couldn't finish and promises you couldn't keep, but in the end everything would always be alright, because there was a light inside your mind that shone through your eyes and illuminated the world in a golden glow, greater than both the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the moon, brighter than stars and louder than any shout, any action, could ever be, because you were you, and you were alive, and was that not in and of itself worth being happy of? The innumerable problems you'd solved with nothing more than naked words and simple smiles left Denki awestruck. Of course, more often than not, those problems would originate with him - but despite this, you'd never left him. Rather than leave when other opportunities seemed far better, other friends seemed far more reliable, other people behaved far more beautifully.

You'd always been by his side.

And yet, now, when he longed for you most, when he missed you with every fiber of his being, when every inhale was filled with photosynthetic flower petals of memories and every exhale of dry, drooping daisies, you simply - weren't.

And yet somehow you hadn't changed. You were still the same bubbly, extroverted, passionate picture of perfection that you had been for nearly all your life in Denki's mind. You still said hello, and goodbye, and maintained common courtesies. You still laughed and smiled at Denki.

But the difference lay in that itself - everything you did was at Denki.

Nothing was with Denki.

When the two of you had been out in your garden, mere children, with fledgling quirks and minds and comprehension of the world around them, in particularly temperate evenings, you both would find yourself searching the vast area of land for that lost legend, the rarity of four-leaf clovers. You were rocket scientists in space finding new planets, pirates discovering treasure, adventurers popping new locations onto maps and into mainstream media and the daily mindsets of average people. You played with the grass and yet you were parting oceans, and the ants were civilians, and the you were king and queen, hand in hand, looking down upon your loyal subjects with divine power but also divine love, building bridges out of leaves over small puddles or drying streams, tying the stems of multicolored flowers together to make paper crowns over your paper empire, and yet chlorophyll was gold, and your empire was gold, and you were gold and the sun was gold and you were rich, not in money but in joy, not in materialism but in manner, not in petulant affairs but in honest endeavors.

Yet like all things, that richness had begun to ebb away, now seemingly siphoned up by the second because a kingdom was not a kingdom without a king, and a king was not a king without his queen.  Instead the divided factions had formed and now Denki was a sole dictator, oppressing his people just as he oppressed himself, wondering why they couldn't please him just as often as wondering why he couldn't please you.  The foggy gray veil enclosing the precious memories of childhood had begun to fade, and rather than golden reminiscence there was cyanide cognition that what was once had may never be received again, may never so much as move another millimeter.

He was once more at the gate separating his decaying democracy from yours, desperately knocking, but to no avail, never to any avail, because now that you had your king there was no need for another, and the best that Denki could ever be was but a lowly jester.

As the bell for third period rang and the three - you, Tetsutetsu, and Denki - entered the classroom, Denki slumped in his seat, twirling his pencil back and forth round his fingers as though a magician whose audience had long abandoned him for a real wizard.  Nevertheless his gaze would flicker up from the pastime ever now and then, and it just so happened that on the forty-third flip his eyes met the corners of yours, but your eyes met Tetsutetsu's, and you were running a hand through his soft raincloud of hair, a wide smile plastered upon your face as though you were forevermore a plastic doll, with a grin so lovingly crafted upon your lips that even the highest of bidders could never afford you, a grin that was priceless and belonged solely to your boyfriend and to no one else.

Then, a revelation.

Tetsutetsu may have been king.

But Denki vowed to be the best damned jester that anyone had ever seen.