Disclaimer: I own no part of Love Hina, but you already knew that, didn't you? It's not like Ken Akamatsu could really write in English this badly, amirite?

Author's Note: I've come to realize recently that I tend to stick awfully close to canon in most of my stories. I am unsure of why this is. Maybe I feel uncomfortable straying away from the beaten path? Or perhaps I fear wasting the precious free time of those reading my stories with something that might be considered uninteresting? Whatever it is, it's time to remedy this problem.

As John Cleese so famously put it: And now for something completely different.

Draw With Me

Prologue

Perched on the roof of Hinata Sou, Keitaro Urashima stared with lifeless eyes upon the coastal town of Hinata Onsen at the bottom of the hill, and the ocean beyond, wondering how in the world he could have been so blind, despite the thick glasses sitting crookedly on the bridge of his nose. But then again, those glasses were made to help him see well with his eyes, and offered nothing in matters of the heart. If there were such a device, however, he would have fought, stolen and killed to make such a thing his own. If anything, it would have at the very least saved him from his current predicament.

Hindsight, so they say, is twenty-twenty. Keitaro had heard of such a saying before, but he never truly understood what it meant until that fateful day two weeks prior. Oh, how blissfully naïve he had been, oblivious to the cruel card fate was about to play on him. Thinking he was surely on the way to turning the corner in his Godforsaken life, the terrible power of a few thoughtless words from another ignorant soul had wholly sundered his burgeoning lot in life.

"That girl you remember…couldn't be me," Naru Narusegawa had said so flippantly, shredding his heart to ribbons. And on top of that, she explained how she had made her own promise with some other guy two years ago to make it into Tokyo University. Keitaro had nothing at all to do with her. Her words seemed cruel to him, but how could he, in his right mind, blame her? It was his own fault for letting his self-admittedly overactive imagination get the better of him. What was he thinking, that a two-year-old could have the wherewithal to form such a precious pact with a boy thrice her age? Such nonsense. While the woman was frighteningly bright, he could not imagine her forming complete sentences at two-years-old such as the young girl from his memory did. Though her face was nothing but a blur in his mind, her words were etched deeply in his memory, and would likely never be forgotten.

Even worse, Naru's all-too-obvious revelation was given at the worst possible time: the second day of the Tokyo University entrance examination. A whole year's worth of study, no, three years, in fact, had led him to that moment. Just that morning, he was supremely confident that this would be the year that his hard work would bear fruit, and he would soon be a student at the most prestigious school in all of Japan. But now, sitting pitifully on the roof of his dormitory, he could not for the life of him remember anything about the tests he had taken that day.

His failure was a foregone conclusion. His tenants could have surmised the same when they saw his face when he and Naru returned from the testing facility that afternoon. He retreated to his room and locked himself inside for the rest of the night, and was a phantom living in his own property for the next two weeks, avoiding contact with anyone else as much as possible.

He climbed to the roof of the building on a daily basis, fooling himself with the excuse that he went there to think. More nonsense. There was nothing to think about. He was there to sulk, and avoid contact with the other residents while he did. And today, like every other day before, there he was again, cradling his legs to his chest, hugging himself like he wished to hug the girl from his memories. And whoever that girl was, it obviously was not the girl living in the room directly above his.

Fatigued from the aerial acrobatics display his brain was performing, Keitaro's eyelids began to feel as though they were tied to heavy stones dropped from a tall building. The rest of his body followed suit, and he fell backward, emitting a heavy sigh as his spine made contact with the roof tiles.

"What are you doing up here?" an all-too familiar voice asked the ronin seemingly out of nowhere, the source of the tomboyish voice much closer to him than he expected. Startled, he quickly glanced upwards towards the girl squatting down no more than two feet in front of him.

White, Keitaro's brain screamed, and he quickly averted his eyes, rolling to one side and curling up into a fetal position, sure as the sun he was about to get pummeled to the ends of the earth. Why did she show up here now? Why can't she just leave me alone? And why does she insist on wearing such short skirts, giving me a plain-as-day view of her panties all the time? "Nothing," he blurted out, unable to come up with anything to say of any substance.

"The results are getting posted today, so we should get going now," the object of Keitaro's affection, Naru Narusegawa, said.

Another shock to Keitaro's fragile heart. He had completely forgotten that today was the day the results for the Toudai examinations would be publicly posted outside of the university. "Why don't you head out, then? You don't need to worry about me," he replied somberly.

Naru chuckled and took a step in Keitaro's direction, and he responded by rolling away from her. "What are you saying, dummy? You need to look for your name too."

"There's no way I could have passed, so there's no need for me to go all the way out there to see that I've failed," Keitaro said, continuing to shuffle away from the girl that was trying to catch him like she were a cat trying to pounce on a bird.

"Come on, you're just being ridiculous. You can't know that unless you look for yourself, so let's go!" Naru protested, grabbing at Keitaro's shirt, but it slipped out of her grasp.

"Just go by yourself! I don't have anything to do with you, anyway!" Keitaro continued to roll across the roof, thanking his lucky stars that they were affixed tightly. If one of the tiles sprang loose, he would likely fall do his eventual doom. On the other hand, perhaps that would not be such a terrible thing.

"Don't be like this! I'm really nervous and I don't want to go by myself, so just come with me, already!" Naru yelled, finally snatching Keitaro firmly by the back hem of his shirt.

Keitaro gave up the fight now that the young woman had snared him. "You're number one in the nation, Narusegawa. What do you have to worry about?" he asked calmly, unable to find the wherewithal to turn and face her.

Naru loosed her death-grip on the landlord, but held on to the hem of his shirt just the same. "I'm…not that confident either," she admitted, though it pained her to say it to someone as pitiful as the two-time, and likely three-time, ronin.

And with those simple words, what was hazy instantly turned to crystal-like clarity. Regardless of the difference in their average scores, in that very moment, they were both sailing along in the same boat. The two shared the same path and their destination was one and the same. And regardless of his history of failure, there was something markedly different about this time around, and that difference was holding onto his shirt, begging him to not abandon her when she needed him most.

"Alright, I'll go," he stated softly.

Nearly three hours later, Keitaro was standing still as stone outside the front of Tokyo University, watching with some amusement as the woman he accompanied paced to and fro, a scowl painted on her face. And she was not the only one. Many of the hundreds of other potential Toudai-seis packed like sardines in the small posting courtyard were also bouncing about restlessly and grumbling about the length of the wait.

The towering white banners with the official test numbers and their owners who passed and qualified for admittance to the school, was to be posted an hour prior. However, due to unexplained circumstances, the posting was delayed with no timeframe or deadline. Keitaro could understand the crowd's impatience, but he also knew that bouncing off the walls was not going to do anyone any good. "Why don't you just relax? All you're doing is tiring yourself out," he said to his honey-haired tenant-slash-fellow test taker.

Naru stopped in her tracks and whirled around with breathtaking dexterity, a wild-eyed expression on her face as she glared at Keitaro. "Relax? How can you expect me to relax? This is the most important moment in my life, you know!"

Trying his best to keep the chuckles in his abdomen in check, Keitaro might have agreed with her if this were not the third time he was subjected to this seemingly never-ending moment of truth. Perhaps he had learned how to relax during the wait due to repetition, or perchance he was so certain of his failure that he simply lacked the will to care about the result in this particular instance.

"I know that, but it's not like wearing the soles off your shoes is going to make the results come any faster," Keitaro replied somberly.

Naru furrowed her brow at the man. It was not like him, a dunce, klutz and occasional pervert, to say something so sage. "What's eating you?" she asked, noting the look of indifference on his countenance.

Keitaro looked up and noticed some commotion coming from the main throng of the crowd. "Looks like it's starting," he said, nodding his head in that direction for Naru's benefit.

A group of uniformed volunteers exited one of the buildings carrying several large rolls of paper; so long, in fact, that it took two of the volunteers to carry each of them, and several wooden structures fabricated for the single purpose of displaying the results written on the paper rolls. With machine-like precision and quickness, the workers set up the wood structures in a long row, unrolled the papers and hammered them to the wooden boards.

"This is it," Naru exclaimed with both excitement and trepidation, clutching a fist to her chest. "We'll count to three and look together, alright?"

Keitaro really did not want to look. Confirming his worst fear for a third time, he did not know if he could handle it yet again. "My name isn't going to be there, I just know it."

"Chin up, Keitaro," Naru replied, nudging his cheek with her knuckle. "You won't know for sure unless you look, right?"

She was right. There was still a glimmer of hope. After that first day of exams, he felt extremely confident that he performed very well. Maybe, if fortune would smile upon him for once in his life, the results from those exams were enough to push him over the top. "Yeah, let's do it."

"Ready, set!"

And the pair raised their heads, scanning the boards for their exam numbers. Keitaro found his row first, and scanned downward from the top slowly, biting his lip in anticipation. And as luck would have it…

His name was not on the list. He let out the breath he did not realize he was holding and closed his eyes, feeling utterly defeated. Fortune had turned her back on him once more. Strangely enough, however, the sting of his failure did not pierce so deep this time around, considering the result was as he expected.

After another deep breath, he turned and scanned for Naru. His cursory glance coming up empty, he trudged through the horde of cheering, yelling, crying and pouting passers and failures alike, discovering the bespectacled girl looking intently at one of the boards. Something had caught her attention, whatever it was. Could she have possibly not been able to find her name? Impossible, he thought. If she failed, it had to be some sort of mistake.

He moved to her side, looking up at the board with her. "What's the verdict?" he asked.

"It's there," the girl murmured in reply.

"Say again?"

"I did it, Keitaro." She turned to him, a single tear of uninhibited joy rolling down her cheek. "I passed!"

A/N: And that's it for now. I realize this is more of a teaser than anything, but I wanted to share this with you all and try to get some feedback. Drop me a note and let me know if you'll be interested in an original story from me that is not a canon pairing. Thanks a lot for all you do, everyone. You're the best! C