A/N: (IMPORTANT) This one-shot is intended to accompany my sister's chaptered fic, Veranderung, and makes reference to events therein, up to and including chapter twenty (uploaded today). If you haven't read that fic, you may not understand what's going on in this one-shot. It is an AU. A few things are a little different from canon.

If you have read it and are up to speed, I hope you enjoy my attempt at a humor vignette. :)

The romantic lives of his classmates (such as they were not, mostly) weren't technically Shima's concern. He had bigger things to worry about after all, between deceiving his childhood friends in this hush-hush double-timing operation and pursuing Izumo-chan with all the enthusiasm he could muster and wrestling with the doubts brought on by Konekomaru's Child-of-Hell theory...just to name a few.

But it's not like this was something you had to snoop around to notice. Hell, they practically shoved it in everybody's faces. Always showing up together, hanging around each other, constantly murmuring back and forth in quick snatches while nobody was really paying them any attention, delivering tardiness excuses on the other's behalf (A wardrobe malfunction? Shima was tempted to drawl more than once. I wonder what caused that...)

Yamada and Angelina-chan were definitely going out.

Pity, really. Izumo might have been a goddess walking the earth, but Angelina wasn't too shabby herself. If only she was unattached...

And then came the ghouls and the Exwire exam and it was a little odd at the time but he'd been a little spooked despite himself and so no wonder his observations weren't quite clicking in real time...

Angelina liked Rin?

And Yamada had called her out on it?

(Oh-ho, trouble in paradise? Angelina-chan, I'd willingly be your rebound...)

And things had then carried on more or less as normal except perhaps that Shima noticed, from time to time, not only the little glances and movements between Yamada and Angelina, but also from Angelina to Rin, the lucky devi—dog. Lucky dog.

But still Yamada and Angelina hung out and showed up together to class or used each other as a main point of contact and, in short, seemed completely unlike a couple going through a break-up.

Shima was a spy. He had to read people, to fit into situations. He had to gather information just by observing things. And dammit, he was good at it...or at least, he thought he was. Now he wasn't so certain.

Couple, or not a couple? Breaking up over Rin, or...what?

It wasn't until the morning they left for their official Exorcist Camping Trip that Shima thought he'd found the answer. He may have been laying on the ground, rejected and broken and probably bleeding out the head somewhere, but he'd still seen (and heard, through the ringing in his right ear) what Yamada said.

They were a couple. There was a fight, but maybe not a really serious one. Rin was either the revenge ploy and/or rebound...on both sides...or there was some other motive to their game. It was all so obvious that it was the plotline of hundreds of girly manga everywhere, from what Shima understood.

And from that alone, he also understood the answer.

They clearly wanted to make it a threesome, whether they knew it yet or not.

Maybe, in the interests of being a good friend, he should bring this up to one of them.

Or maybe he'd just settle back and watch the general flailing for a while longer.

You couldn't get entertainment this good for free.