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The seating chart was posted on the blackboard at the front of the chemistry laboratory, where a bunch of students gathered to see where they would be sitting for the new semester. Naruto had squeezed into the third row of the murmuring crowd, bobbing his head up and down as he went through the names on the sheet before his face suddenly showed pure despair.
“We’re not together!” he exclaimed.
“Is that so?” Gaara asked from behind the swarming students.
“I’m with Kiba.”
“Good luck.”
Naruto turned to Gaara with the expression of a man who had been personally betrayed by the universe. “Gaara. Buddy. You’re literally top three in our year. I had a plan.”
“Your plan was to copy my answers.”
“My plan was collaborative learning,” Naruto argued. “They just—they can’t just separate us like that. So cruel.” He sniffled dramatically.
Gaara snorted at his antics. He and Naruto had been like brothers since elementary school—ever since they had that legendary fight outside school and Naruto had changed him for the better. Junior high had separated them for a few years but they’d kept in touch through letters. At the start of senior high, they were overjoyed to find out that they were in the same school, same class again. One semester had since passed, and they’d spent most of it doing practically everything together.
Gaara stepped closer to the blackboard to join Naruto as some people made their way out of the crowd, searching for his name on the chart, which showed six laboratory benches—each with four seats on either side and one sink on either end. He spotted his name near the middle. Beside it, another name was circled together: Fuu.
Gaara wasn’t the type to proactively make friends. If he hadn’t been seated around someone or grouped up with them for any activity, there was a great chance he’d never really talked to them for the entirety of the last semester—and Fuu was one of them.
Not that this concerned him particularly. Gaara wasn’t the type to make a fuss about lab partners. Whoever it was, he would get the work done. Plus Fuu didn’t seem like an uncooperative person. From what he’d observed, she had Naruto’s brand of energy—sunshine and noise—which he had plenty of experience managing.
“At least we’re at adjacent tables,” Naruto said consolingly as they moved to their places. “I can still see your work from here if I lean.” He stood at his position and craned his neck in Gaara’s direction to test his theory.
“Your vision will be blocked from that angle.”
Naruto clicked his tongue. “I’ll just walk over.”
Gaara shook his head in mild exasperation and turned back to face the front, setting down his belongings and putting on his lab coat. He pulled out his stool and sat down, opening his lab manual to scan the experiment procedure once more while classmates settled around him, their voices carrying an easy energy that would fade away by exam season.
Ms. Yugito Nii stepped in as the bell rang and asked the nearest students to close the doors. “On Tuesday we introduced the relevant acid-base concepts. Today we will do volumetric analysis. Acid-base titration,” she said. “Anyone did their preview of the experiment?”
A handful of hands went up. Gaara’s was not among them—he had done the preview, but lifting his hand felt unnecessary when he could simply confirm his readiness by performing the experiment correctly and swiftly.
“Please make it a habit to preview your lessons,” Ms. Nii said, with the sigh of someone who had been saying this for several years and expected to be saying it for several more. “You’ll thank me when you go to college.”
Their chemistry teacher was a passionate teacher who took her lectures very seriously. She always spent the first ten minutes doing a quick review of the previous lesson, and would call whoever wasn’t paying attention to answer questions. Gaara was grateful for her enthusiasm. Not every teacher shared it. Mr. Hatake, for instance, would only read over the history textbook. Gaara was sure if Mr. Hatake could use a scarecrow to replace him, he would.
The front door banged open.
Everyone turned. Fuu stood in the doorway, frozen mid-jog, one hand still on the handle.
“Oops…” she said, looking sheepishly at Ms. Nii. Apparently she hadn’t heard the bell or had thought she could get into the lab before the teacher.
“Go find your seat,” Ms. Nii said simply, and turned back to the class.
As Ms. Nii walked them through the objective and procedure of the experiment as well as the required chemicals, Fuu quickly looked up her name on the seating chart and hurried over, the sound of her dragging her stool awfully screechy in the quiet class. She flopped down on Gaara’s right and dropped her lab manual and pencil case on the bench with a thud, then spent a moment re-securing her orange clip to pin up loose strands of teal hair.
Gaara returned his attention to the front.
Today’s experiment was straightforward: calculate the concentration of a hydrochloric acid solution using pre-prepared 0.1 M sodium carbonate solution as the titrant and methyl orange as the pH indicator. Three trials for an average.
“Umm, hey, Gaara.” A whisper, close to his right ear. “What’s ‘primary standard’?”
He turned slightly. Fuu was leaning towards him, frowning and pointing at the blackboard.
He looked back at the terms and chemical equations the teacher had scrawled. “The standard solution. Sodium carbonate,” he said quietly.
“Oh…” She sounded unsatisfied with his answer. “Primary…”
Ms. Nii moved on to the apparatus, demonstrating the way to use a burette.
“Hey…” Fuu again, still a whisper. “What’s ‘HIn’?”
“The indicator.”
“Why is it denoted that way? With an ‘H’?”
“It’s typically a weak acid.”
“Okay.”
Ms. Nii was done with her explanations, reminding everyone to turn in their lab report before next Monday.
“Uh, which one is the graduated pipette?”
“Look at Figure 1 in your manual.”
A pause. He could feel her looking at the diagram. “Hmm, okay… Oh, and it’s written here: primary standard. Why didn’t I see this?”
Because you didn’t do the preview, Gaara thought.
When Ms. Nii finished and the class started getting up to collect their equipment, Gaara turned to Fuu. “Get the burette, pipette, funnel, flasks, and beakers,” he said, tracing the list on the manual. “I’ll get the rest.”
Fuu snapped a small salute. “Roger.”
She went off, and Gaara went the other direction to fetch the pipette filler, wash bottle, retort stand, burette clamp and white tile. By the time he came back, Fuu had placed the glassware on the bench, donning a lab coat over her white cold-shoulder long-sleeved crop top and pale teal high-rise flared mini skirt. The lab coat was so long it was covering her white knee-high socks. Only her orange ballet flats were showing.
“I forgot to bring my lab coat, so Ms. Nii lent me hers,” she said, holding up her arms to show Gaara the oversized sleeves. “She’s so tall. I envy her.”
Gaara gave no comment, putting the things he brought back on the bench. “Go get the standard solution,” he said.
“Bossy,” Fuu teased.
“I’ll get the analyte.”
“Alright.”
They each grabbed a 250 mL beaker and went to the front, where the reagent bottles of sodium carbonate and hydrochloric acid solutions were placed.
“Chemistry is so hard,” Fuu grumbled, tilting the bottle of sodium carbonate to pour. “I got terrible grades last semester.”
Gaara poured the hydrochloric acid in silence, filling his beaker to just over halfway—enough for three trials and rinsing.
“I studied, though,” she added, as though he’d implied otherwise. “It just doesn’t stick. I understand the concepts in class but nothing comes up during a test.”
Gaara put down the reagent bottle and picked up his beaker.
“How did you get so good at it?” she asked as she finished filling her beaker.
He thought about it for a moment. “I like it. That helps.”
Fuu frowned as they started back toward their bench. “I don’t like it. There’s so much to memorize, and then you have to calculate so many things.”
Gaara said nothing. The balance between memorization and logical thinking was precisely what he liked about chemistry. More than history, which was just memorization. More than mathematics, which was just logical thinking. Chemistry asked for both at once.
They got back and Gaara attached the burette clamp to the retort stand, while Fuu took the burette to the sink to run tap water through it. He was tightening the screw of the clamp when a rush of water hit the bench: Fuu had turned the faucet too fast, producing a strong stream that hit the mouth of the burette and sprayed sideways across the counter. She quickly shut the water with a short noise of surprise, looked at the puddle, then at Gaara.
“Sorry, I’ll wipe it up,” she said with an embarrassed smile and reached for the cleaning cloth draped over the sink rim.
As Fuu wiped the water away, Gaara took out a sheet of label stickers from the drawer. He wrote “HCl” and “Na₂CO₃” on two stickers, tore them off, and attached them onto the respective beakers. From the bench behind them, Kiba’s voice cut through the low hum of the lab. “Hey! Naruto!”
“The water pressure’s too strong…”
“My manual’s wet!”
Naruto was standing at the sink, holding a dripping beaker with puppy eyes and a pout that made it hard to stay mad at him. Kiba was blotting his lab manual with his sleeve. Apparently Naruto had made the same mistake with the faucet.
Gaara looked back at his retort stand. The corners of his mouth lifted, just slightly. His impression of Fuu as a Naruto variant seemed accurate.
Fuu finished washing the burette—with a weak stream this time—and was about to attach it to the stand when Gaara stopped her. “We need to rinse it first.”
“Oh, right.”
She turned the stopcock perpendicular to the burette, sat down on her stool, and held the burette just above her lap for Gaara to place the funnel on top.
“You smell nice,” she blurted out as Gaara picked up the wash bottle to squirt a little distilled water into the burette through the funnel.
Gaara tensed. He’d forgotten they had lab class when he put on cologne this morning, then forgot he was wearing it due to olfactory fatigue. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have worn it here.” Fragrances could mask the odor of dangerous chemicals, which was often the first indicator of a leak or hazard. Fortunately they weren’t dealing with gases today.
“No, no. It’s a warm and grounding smell. I like it, really.” Fuu’s eyes widened, as if taken aback that he would think she meant it sarcastically. “What’s it made from?”
Gaara glanced at her. Very few people pointed out that he often wore cologne, and he could only hope they liked the scents as much as he did. “Cedarwood and bergamot. Mainly.”
“Cool,” Fuu said as Gaara set down the wash bottle and removed the funnel. She held up the burette, then paused. “Uh, how do you rinse it?”
“Like this,” Gaara said, taking the burette from her and angling it almost horizontally, rotating it so that the distilled water covered its entire inner wall, before holding it vertically again and discharging the water through the tip.
“Oh, okay. Sorry, I was reading my manual and missed the demo,” Fuu said, that embarrassed smile on her face again.
“Now the HCl rinse,” Gaara said. “Pour a little in.”
“I wanna try rinsing too.” Fuu held out her hands, waiting for him to hand over the burette. Gaara returned it and picked up the funnel and the beaker containing hydrochloric acid, poured a little solution into the burette, then let her angle and rotate it the way he had.
It seemed that Fuu preferred to figure things out and learn, when many would simply let others do the work. It was a good quality to have.
After Fuu discharged the acid and settled back into her seat, Gaara poured more into the burette again, this time until the level overshot the 0 reading, then removed the funnel.
“I’ll wash it,” Fuu offered, taking the funnel from Gaara’s hand and holding out the burette in exchange.
He took the burette and set it up on the stand, then slowly discharged some of the solution until the meniscus lowered to the 0 mark.
“Record the initial reading,” he said.
“0?”
“0.00 mL. We need two digits after the decimal point.”
“Okay, wait.” Fuu took out a pen with a hanging charm that was shaped like a rhinoceros beetle—except it had three pairs of wings and a long tail.
“That’s a special-looking beetle,” Gaara remarked as she wrote down the figure in her manual.
“This? His name’s Chomei,” Fuu said with a fond smile.
“It has a name?”
“Yep, I named it,” she said proudly, as if it were a real pet beetle.
“Are these kinds of pens trending now?” he asked as he picked up the graduated pipette and filler. “Naruto just bought me a similar pen last week.”
“Huh? I don’t know, I just bought it cause it’s cute,” Fuu said. “What’s yours like?”
Gaara squeezed the filler to remove air from the red rubber bulb and placed it on top of the pipette. “It’s in my pencil case.”
As Fuu fished around in Gaara’s pencil case, he rinsed the pipette—dipping it into the beaker of sodium carbonate, pinching valve S of the filler to draw solution up until the level overshot the 0 mark, then pressing valve E to discharge the solution into the sink.
“Aha! Oh it’s so cute!” Fuu exclaimed, holding up Gaara’s charm pen. “What animal is he though?”
“Naruto says it’s a tanuki, but it looks more like a pangolin.”
“Hmm, he’s cute either way,” Fuu shrugged, turning the charm over between her fingers. “I’m calling him Shukaku.”
“Why?”
“It’s just a cute name.”
Gaara’s brow furrowed in confusion as Fuu brought one of the three Erlenmeyer flasks closer for him to draw up the standard solution again—exactly 10 mL of it—and transfer it into the conical flask.
Calling weird-looking creatures cute. He filed away another detail that his best friend and Fuu shared.
“I’ll go get the indicator,” Fuu said and took the flask to the front to add two drops of methyl orange with a dropper, turning the solution a yellow color.
“We’re finally ready—oh!”
A clear, crisp crack.
The room got quieter for a moment.
Fuu covered her mouth with both hands, her smile gone. She’d accidentally swept the funnel off the edge of the bench with her oversized sleeve when she retracted her arm after placing the flask beneath the burette.
“You guys okay?” Naruto asked from the next bench, pausing his work.
Fuu stood staring at the broken glass on the floor. “Oh no…”
Gaara glanced around. No one seemed to be injured from the broken pieces. “We’re fine,” he replied and left to get the broom and long-handled dustpan from the corner of the lab. When he returned, Ms. Nii had come over to check on them.
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Nii,” Fuu said in a small voice as Gaara started sweeping the glass fragments, stepping back to give him room. “I should’ve put it down properly.”
“That’s alright. Just make sure you sweep thoroughly,” Ms. Nii said, and moved on.
Fuu turned to Gaara. “I’ll sweep,” she said.
He didn’t look up from the floor. “We’re in the same group.”
She went quiet at that. Then she gripped the dustpan, holding it steady while he swept the last of the shards into it. “Thanks, Gaara,” she said. “You’re so nice.”
He held out his hand for the dustpan, dumped the glass in the designated waste bin, returned the tools, and came back to the bench. Fuu had placed the white tile beneath the flask, hand on the flask as if the solution in it would spill if she let go. She was standing stiffly, shoulders squared.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“Yeah, just…” She exhaled, letting go of the flask. “I should’ve put the funnel upside down, not sideways.”
“The lab doesn’t have collection trays for each group’s glassware,” Gaara said. “It should.”
Fuu looked at him with knitted eyebrows. “I was just careless.”
Gaara considered this. “I should’ve noticed and reminded you too,” he said. “We’re both responsible.”
Fuu’s orange eyes widened with surprise. The stiffness in her shoulders softened.
“You’re really kind,” she said, almost bashfully. “And I thought you were scary,” she added with a little laugh.
Gaara sat down on his stool and positioned his hand on the stopcock of the burette. “We should start the first trial,” he said.
Fuu pursed her lips as she sat. “What if I mess up again?”
“I’ll handle the burette,” Gaara offered. “You just need to shake the flask.”
He didn’t actually need help with this. But Fuu needed something to do with her hands—to remind herself that she’d been doing fine, and one broken funnel wouldn’t change that.
“Okay,” she said.
“Whenever I pause, swirl it until the orange bits disappear,” he said as Fuu picked up the flask and positioned it just below the burette.
Gaara opened the stopcock to add a little hydrochloric acid into the flask, closing it shortly after. Fuu shook the flask in a circular motion. The transparent acid turned orange at contact with the sodium carbonate solution, briefly spreading like a mini firework turned upside down before disappearing into the swirling yellow liquid. He began repeating the motion, with Fuu following his rhythm. For a little while there was just the quiet of it as they watched the flask closely, the sounds of chatter and clattering glassware dimming into the background.
The orange bits started to take longer to disappear. Fuu swirled the flask harder to speed up the mixing, but her hand knocked into Gaara’s.
“Sorry…!” She paused her swirling.
Gaara simply resumed adding the analyte—dropwise now, as they were getting close to the endpoint—and waited a little longer for Fuu to switch to the other hand to swirl the flask carefully. He noticed from the corner of his eye that Fuu’s cheeks were turning red, and he didn’t know if it meant embarrassment like the previous times, awkwardness, or something else.
Just as Gaara was prepared to wait for another orange drop to slowly fade, the drop of acid turned the whole flask of solution from yellow to orange—not the aggressive orange of the indicator’s starting color, but a soft, warm orange, catching the overhead light. He shut the stopcock immediately.
“Oh,” Fuu breathed, her hand stopping at once. “That’s beautiful.”
She set down the flask on the white tile to confirm the color, then propped her chin on her hands to admire it.
Gaara looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were fixed on the flask, and her eyes were the same color as the solution—that warm, light orange, currently lit up with childlike wonder.
“We did it!” Fuu turned to him, and they both froze at the short distance between their faces. She turned back to the bench and let out a little awkward laugh.
Gaara somehow felt like clearing his throat. He looked back at the flask too.
“Keep swirling it,” he said, more flatly than he intended. “Thirty seconds to confirm the endpoint holds.”
She started swirling the flask again. “Right, right.”
The orange held. Gaara read the meniscus and reached for his pen to write it down on his lab manual—pausing to pick up the other pen instead. The one with the Shukaku charm.
Gaara refilled the burette to the 0 mark while Fuu transferred another 10 mL of the standard solution into a new Erlenmeyer flask for the second trial.
“I wanna try using the burette too,” Fuu said.
Gaara glanced at her. The same eagerness she’d shown when she’d asked to rinse the burette was back on her face—not a trace of the stricken look she’d had when the funnel broke.
He picked up the flask. “Sure.”
Fuu took hold of the stopcock and started adding the analyte into the flask, controlling the flow with the hyperfocus of someone defusing a bomb. She was more hesitant than he’d been—opening the stopcock more slowly and closing it too soon, keeping the flow a near-drip from the start. But her hand was steady on the valve, and she stopped when she needed to—catching it when the color shifted.
“There!” she beamed, hand still on the closed stopcock, orange eyes sparkling.
Gaara swirled the flask for thirty more seconds. The orange held again.
“You did it,” he said.
“I did it,” Fuu repeated in a whisper, with the amazement of someone who had not entirely expected to.
“Record the reading.”
“Right. Yes. The reading.” She reached for her manual, still smiling.
For the third trial, Fuu asked to run the titration herself.
“You can do the calculations,” she added.
Gaara felt the corners of his mouth lift slightly. He crossed his arms and leaned back on his stool. “Alright.”
Fuu placed one hand on the stopcock, picked up the flask with her other hand, and started. Gaara watched her add more hydrochloric acid in the beginning with newfound confidence—drawing from experience to increase efficiency. She slowed down in her movements, bottom lip caught between her teeth as she added the last drops before the color changed. This time she continued to swirl the flask without a word until it was certain the orange persisted.
“Done,” Fuu announced as she set the flask down.
She stretched, then leaned toward the burette to read it.
“Eye level,” Gaara said.
Fuu paused, then crouched until the meniscus was level with her eyes. “…24.95,” she murmured, then wrote it down.
They collected the recorded readings from both their lab manuals. Fuu leaned in as Gaara began working through the calculations.
“Why do you multiply by two?” she asked, pointing at the number Gaara had written in the equation.
“One mole of sodium carbonate reacts with two moles of hydrochloric acid.”
He pushed his manual closer to her and pointed at the chemical reaction printed on the previous page, writing “1” before Na₂CO₃ and underlining the coefficient “2” before HCl. Fuu nodded slowly as Gaara continued.
“25.05? Is that the average volume of HCl used?”
“Yes. You can get it with mental math,” Gaara replied, using an arrow to add the step of taking the average: (0.02500 + 0.02520 + 0.02495) ÷ 3 = 0.02505.
“Okay.”
Gaara finished calculating (0.1 × 0.01) × 2 ÷ 0.02505 and leaned back for Fuu to see more clearly, circling the approximated answer: 0.0799 M.
Fuu stared at it. “Are we done?”
“Yes.”
“Yes!”
She quickly copied Gaara’s writing onto her lab manual as he placed all three flasks on the white tile. Then her hand shot up before she even raised her head to look for Ms. Nii.
Their teacher came over, examined the color in the flasks—all three still a clean, stable orange—then looked over their calculated concentration.
“Good,” she said, checking the boxes beside their names in her markbook. “The answer is 0.08 M. Good work.”
Fuu waited until Ms. Nii had moved to the next bench before turning to Gaara.
“Gaara.” She looked at him directly, her orange eyes bright. “Thank you. Seriously. You were really patient with me and I know I broke the funnel and asked like eight hundred questions.”
“Asking questions is how you improve,” he said without thinking.
Fuu blinked. “Ehehe. I’m really lucky to have you as my lab partner,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck.
Gaara looked back at his manual and closed it, suppressing the strange urge to cough.
“Go return the other things to the front. I’ll wash these,” he said, gesturing to the beakers and flasks containing solutions.
“Okey-dokey.”
Fuu stood up and pulled the white tile out from under the flasks, grabbed the wash bottle with the other hand, and made her way toward the front of the lab. Most other groups had already finished the experiment, chatting as they dried their hands against their lab coats.
Gaara stood up, pushing his stool under the bench, and took the beakers to the sink. Naruto appeared at his elbow as he was emptying the solutions.
“Hey.” He had the tone of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity.
Gaara glanced at him before turning back to turn on the faucet.
“So. How was it with your new lab partner?” Naruto asked, sounding as if he already knew the answer.
“…Better than with Sai,” Gaara replied.
“That’s a low bar to pass,” Naruto laughed.
“How was it with Kiba?”
“Hmm, I can’t decide if he or Shino was better.” Naruto scratched his chin. “Anyway, I think you and Fuu…” He wrapped an arm around Gaara’s neck. “You guys had really good—” he paused for timing in a way that suggested he had prepared this, “—chemistry.”
He let go of Gaara, laughing at his own joke the way only someone who’d been saving it for twenty minutes could.
Gaara looked at him. Naruto’s smile was wide and completely unrepentant.
“I mean, I saw you gazing at her instead of focusing on whatever you were doing.” Naruto shook his head in disbelief. “That’s so not you.”
Gaara sighed and turned back to finish washing the beakers. “You weren’t paying attention to your own experiment either.”
“Either?! You’re not denying it?!”
Gaara ignored the teasing and went back to take the pipette and burette. Naruto followed.
“You two were sitting so close your shoulders were touching,” he continued to probe. “She’s interesting to you, huh?”
Gaara turned the pipette around under the faucet. “Well, she reminds me of you.”
Naruto opened his mouth, then closed it. His ears went pink.
“Wha—that’s—that’s not an answer!” he spluttered, putting his hands on his hips.
“Hey, Naruto! Don’t leave all the cleaning to me!” Kiba called from the adjacent bench.
Naruto dropped his hands. “Yeah, Shino’s better,” he grumbled and went away.
Gaara brought the washed pipette and burette back. He looked up and scanned the room. At the front of the lab, Fuu had returned her lab coat to Ms. Nii and was saying something to her—some additional apology about the funnel, probably, from the way she was holding her hands together. Ms. Nii shook her head once and waved her off. Fuu bowed anyway.
Gaara looked back down on his bench, picking up one of the flasks. He swirled it once—a slow, deliberate rotation—watching the liquid move up the sides.
The orange didn’t fade. It was warm and light and persistent, the color of a correctly-run experiment. The color of Fuu’s eyes when she’d marvelled at it.
He set the flask down, unaware of the small smile reflected in the glass.