Well that was quick.
Yeah, I kinda just sat down and wrote this all in the same day, plus like three google doc pages of the next chapter. Wanted to hurry and get this out cause school is probably gonna take up all my time since we are nearing the end of winter quarter.
But anyways, hope you like it! Sorry for any typos like always.

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About a week had gone by since Incinerate had been back at school. He still wasn’t perfectly comfortable wearing an eyepatch around in public, but he was getting used to it little by little. It was finally Friday, though, and Incinerate couldn’t wait to just go home for the weekend and play video games. His headaches from looking at screens were finally gone, and he’d been itching to just sink in hours upon hours of game time. All he had to do was get through the day and he’d be free.

The school day started out fine, nothing out of the ordinary happening. It seemed like it was too good to be true. Nobody picking an argument with him, nobody noticeably staring at his eyepatch, and most importantly, no encounter with Tokage, although he hadn’t gotten to his history class yet.

He walked in with Blaze and sat in his seat. He did everything in his power to not look over to where Tokage was sitting. But of course he did. He noticed Cefiro wasn’t sitting in his seat, and Tokage was just swiping through his phone. It wasn’t often there was only one of them present. They usually were both there or they both skipped. Incinerate couldn’t help but be a little jealous of all the time the Lucario spends with his crush.

He decided to go on his phone to distract himself, which actually ended up working a bit. His attention was brought back to the room when the teacher, a Gardevoir, who also happened to be Monaca’s mother, walked to the front of the class and said hello to the students. She took roll and then started to talk about the next assignment.

“Okay, class. So today I’m going to be assigning your group projects. You will be working in groups of two. I’ll call out who your partners are in just a moment.” She explained. Incinerate felt pretty confident he’d get paired up with Blaze just for convenience since they lived in the same house. No way she’d pair him up with Tokage. She knows all too well about the problematic history the two have had. “You and your partner will do research on a certain important event in history that the two of you choose. You’ll have to create a presentation to present your research to the class, but how you present it is totally up to you!” She smiled at the students who didn’t look entirely interested or excited in the slightest.

She picked up a piece of paper that had the list of the groups on it. “Okay, so, your groups…” she started. She called off a list of names, pairing up certain students. Incinerate noticed friends were getting paired together, so he felt even better about his chances of getting paired with Blaze. However, soon his chances were crushed, “Blaze, you’ll be paired up with Cefiro. You’ll just have to contact him to let him know.”

“Alright” Blaze responded. Him and Cefiro had been friendly in the past. Incinerate looked around quickly before noticing…

“And lastly, Incinerate and Tokage. I didn’t miss anyone did I?” Nobody responded. Incinerate had a look of panic on his face. His eye was wide open in disbelief. He quickly looked over to Tokage, who had about the same reaction. The two made eye contact but then quickly turned their heads back to face the front of the room. They stayed like that for pretty much the rest of the class. Nothing really registered with Incinerate until the bell snapped him out of it. He shook his head slightly and watched as everyone else left. Blaze waited for him, but Incinerate said, “You go ahead, I’ll catch up.” Blaze didn’t question him, just saying “okay” and heading out of the room.

Incinerate approached the Gardevoir, who he had known for a few years due to being one of his friends’ mom. She was sitting at her desk entering data into her computer. To his surprise, Tokage also went up to her. He assumed it was for the same reason as him.

She looked up at them and before they could speak, said, “Sorry.”

“Please don’t pair us together” Incinerate asked as nicely as he could. He was standing pretty close to Tokage and could smell his subtle, yet nice cologne.

“Yeah, really.” Tokage added.

“Sorry, guys, but I’m not going to change the groups. You two will just have to learn to work together on this. It’s just once and then you don’t have to again.” she said, to which the two reptiles sighed. “If you guys don’t do this project, your grades are going to go down a lot. This project is worth about twenty percent of your grade in this class.”

Incinerate and Tokage both were a little shocked by that number. They knew there was no way they were going to change her mind.

“Fine…” mumbled Tokage. Incinerate just looked over at him and didn’t say anything.

“You two should get going, you’ll be late for your next class.” She said. The two grumpily walked out and walked down the hall together. It was awkward, for sure. Everyone was pretty much at their classes or lunch, so the hallways were nearly empty. Tokage was the one to break the silence, “So, where are we working on this?” He asked. Incinerate tried not to think about how red his cheeks were...well, a deeper red than his scales usually are.

“Uhm...I guess we can just do it at my house after school.” He quickly realised how the wording there was awful. He felt his face burn up, “w-well, cause the house’ll be empty.” He mentally slapped himself, “So we won’t get disrupted while we’re working.”

“Alright.” Tokage didn’t seem to notice how awkward Incinerate sounded. The two walked down the hall to lunch silently.

The end of the school day came, and Incinerate left with Blaze to their car down in the lot. They got in and Blaze drove them both home. They pulled into an empty driveway and got out of the car and entered the house. Incinerate sat his stuff down by the front door while Blaze when up to his room to get ready to go to work. The reptile flopped down on the couch and dreaded the upcoming work session with Tokage. Keeping his feelings to himself in school was easy because other people were around and he sat on the other side of the room from him. But how was he supposed to act ‘normal’ alone with Tokage and presumably sitting right next to him?

He grabbed a pillow and pushed it onto his face and let out an angry and annoyed growl.

He tossed it aside when he was done and Makalu ran in and jumped on it, hopping up and down on it repeatedly. Incinerate watched him and rolled his eyes as he laid his head back on the arm of the couch. A few minutes later, Blaze came down the stairs, ready for work.

“See you later, dude. Try not to kill each other.” He chuckled to which Incinerate gave an annoyed “Fuck off.” Blaze smiled and rolled his eyes as he exited the house and drove off to work.

Incinerate had about ten minutes until Tokage got to the house. He only lived down the street so it was only a few minute walk to get from his house to Incinerate’s. He found that he couldn’t sit still. He was too anxious waiting for the green reptile to arrive. He would pace around the room and every time he got to the window, he’d look out to see if he could see Tokage walking down the sidewalk. Makalu followed him, looking up at him the entire time.

“What do you want?” Incinerate asked him. Makalu just barked once and licked Incinerate’s ankle. “You’re weird” Incinerate added.

A few minutes later, he heard a knock at the door. Makalu barked at the door repeatedly. Incinerate took a deep breath and walked over to the door. His hand was a little shaky. As soon as Incinerate unlocked the door and started opening it, Makalu stopped barking and ran away into Froaker’s bedroom, being scared of the sound the lock makes.

Incinerate opened the door and saw Tokage, who had looked up from his phone.

“Hey.” was his only greeting, and Incinted Tokage inside. Tokage walked in and said “Hey” back. He didn’t seem like he was in a bad mood or anything, or that he was going to make fun of Incinerate like he usually would. He carried his backpack over his left shoulder, “So where we gonna work?” He asked. Incinerate snapped out of his random thoughts about the reptile, “oh, uh...I guess upstairs. I don’t know when people are gonna get home and they’ll just be annoying.” He said, still extremely nervous. “Uh, follow me.” He grabbed his backpack from it’s spot by the door and headed upstairs, and Tokage followed.

They entered Incinerate’s room, which was nice and tidy. They took a seat on the floor and got out their notebooks and laptops.

“Alright, so what topic should we do?” Incinerate asked, just trying to keep his mind off of anything Tokage related, which was pretty much impossible.

“Well, the easiest would be World War II.” Tokage said.

“Alright then let’s do that. The less time we have to put into this to get a good grade, the better.” said Incinerate. He normally wasn’t too concerned about getting A’s and B’s but with how much this project was worth, he didn’t want to screw it up. He also didn’t want to hurt Tokage’s grade any.

“Okay. I guess we can just make a PowerPoint or whatever. I doubt we have to make something super complex and shit.” Tokage said. It was weird to talk to him without sounding annoyed. The two of them actually sounded pretty...comfortable? “I guess let’s just start looking up facts about it and making a list. We can arrange it into a script or whatever later.” Incinerate was a little amazed at how easily Tokage was able to just start this project. It always took Incinerate forever to pick a topic, let alone write an outline for something.

The two researched for a while, occasionally asking if a certain fact or piece of information was good to include. Eventually, they started to get a bit sidetracked from the project and started to just talk. They talked about school, what their families do, stuff like that. The basic ‘getting to know someone’ things. Eventually Tokage asked “So how’s the eye doin?”

Incinerate was a little surprised to hear him bring it up. “Uh, it’s fine. Finally stopped having headaches, and I’m kinda getting used to the lack of depth.” He answered.

“Oh. well, that’s good. My mom was askin’ me how you were.” Tokage said. He smiled a little.

“Ok, gotcha. She was a good nurse.” Incinerate said. Tokage chuckled, “I’ll tell her you said that. She’ll be glad to hear it.” The two smiled at each other a little bit.

“Y’know...it’s honestly kinda nice to not be arguing with each other,” Incinerate said. “I mean, we always do. We never really just sat down and talked like this. Maybe we co-” Incinerate was interrupted as Tokage pressed his lips against his.

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Oh shit.
I'm going to bed now.