Kickout
Part Three: ...'Til Someone Saves Me
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from Fruits Basket. So stop pretending
you think I do – your friends no longer think it’s funny.
happening yet.
upload this – I’m afraid work, various other stories,
and most of all, illness, kept me from writing this in a timely fashion.
normal\'>
normal\'>Part
Three – ...’Til Someone Saves Me
Kyo managed to
wait a lofty grand total of twenty-three hours before visiting Yuki again.
He hadn’t
again, but when he woke up, it was all he could think about – it took all his
restraint to not blurt out to Tohru over breakfast, when she commented sadly on
the fact that she’d made Yuki’s favorite foods and he wasn’t there to eat any
of it, that he could take rat-boy some...
After all, it
would only hurt Tohru to know that Yuki would accept his visits and not hers.
Besides which,
he... wanted this for himself. God only
knew why.
So he worked
quietly at the dojo beside his Master, met Tohru and her friends for lunch
(both he and an obviously upset Tohru very pointedly normal\'>not answering Uo’s increasingly concerned and Hana’s obviously
knowing – or at the very least suspicious
- questions about Yuki’s whereabouts when they hadn’t seen him since
graduation), went through the rounds of having a life – but all the while, his
attention was elsewhere.
It wasn’t
until he was sneaking out again that night that it occurred to him that
somehow, someway, he too had managed to become caged.
When he
reached the cage, Yuki was already standing there, arms resting on that
too-tiny ledge, face upturned, towards the moon.
turned to him, and the very faint smile that passed over Yuki’s face made that
horrible ache start up all over
again.
He wished the
moon and stars were darker, so he couldn’t see.
“You came
back.”
Was that a
question, or a statement? Kyo couldn’t
even tell.
So he
responded (retaliated) with
anger. It was what he was good at; what
he knew.
Especially
with this new version of Yuki before him, he needed very badly to hold on to what
he knew.
“So?
For just a
moment, he could feel Yuki bristling, and it was just like back home, when they
fought over the smallest, stupidest things in their lame attempts to feel
But then Yuki
backed down, without even a scathing remark in reply.
“You’re
different,” Kyo said without thinking.
Yuki’s eyes, already dark, seemed to darken further – though perhaps it
was just a trick of the light.
His voice,
when he spoke, was a whisper, yet it cut Kyo to the core somehow.
“How would you
know?”
And
that... that was true.
But it pissed Kyo off all the same.
...maybe
because it was true.
He didn’t care to figure it out just then.
“Yeah, I just
lived with you for years,” he
snapped. “How could I
princely self?”
Yuki’s gaze
like this, Kyo felt like he was going to drown just looking into those
fathomless eyes...
“You
whisper this time was as harsh as icicles.
“You never bothered to know me.
each other.”
Kyo thought a
moment, staring at that delicate, delicately shadowed face, and something
inside him fell away.
“Yeah, well,
I’m here now,” he said casually, sitting on the ground just far enough away
from the door that he could look up at Yuki without having to crane his neck
too much. “What do you want to know?”
The look on
Yuki’s face was absolutely priceless.
And so it
began. Kyo wasn’t sure quite why, still,
why Yuki allowed it or why he did it, but just about every night, near
see the rat somehow wore on him more than the nights that he could.
He napped
often, never sure when he’d get the chance to do so and so taking every
opportunity to gather his reserves. If
anyone but Tohru thought this odd, no one mentioned it to his face; and she was
so accustomed to seeing him nap on the roof, and so distracted by her worry for
Yuki, that all he had to do was tell her he’d had trouble sleeping the night
before and she’d leave him alone.
It was two
weeks into their new set-up when Kyo came to Yuki’s cage only to find that the
rat wasn’t there.
He waited
until just a while before dawn, calling quietly in the window, skulking a
little outside the rest of the compound hoping to stumble onto some sort of
clue. But Yuki was just
And the hell
of it was, he couldn’t very well normal\'>ask someone what had happened.
He doubted Yuki was really encouraged to have visitors-
And Kyo
especially would be frowned upon (and commented upon, freely and in disgusting
terms, by Shigure and Ayame). He wasn’t
even allowed in the place, let alone
allowed to visit the condemned rat.
Not that he’d
been explicitly forbidden to visit, but who would bother forbidding the cat to
go where he was forbidden and see the
rat that he so hated?
If
they only knew.
But he couldn’t
ask, because he wasn’t supposed to know, and frankly he still didn’t
with Yuki. It was none of their damn
business what he did with his time.
But Yuki –
Kyo
practically ran to Yuki’s cell that
night, which disturbed him greatly – why did he normal\'>care if the rat disappeared?
Good riddance!
...but
he didn’t believe that anymore, and he knew it.
It was the
guilt. He knew it had to be the
guilt. Whatever happened to Yuki from here
on in would be on his shoulders,
because Yuki was living the life he
had been meant for, been destined for...
It was a
relief when he saw a glint of silver-gray inside Yuki’s cell, not only because
it meant Yuki was there, now, but
because it forced him to stop thinking.
He stopped at
his usual distance away and hissed at the window, knowing full well that it
made him seem even more like a cat and not caring.
“Get your ass
out here, rat-boy. You need to explain
something to me right now.”
There was a
brief rustling sound, then silence. Kyo
was about to snap again when a face appeared between the bars.
It was Yuki’s
face, but for a full minute Kyo just stared at him, not recognizing him at
all. Yuki didn’t have such shadowed
eyes. No one ever got close enough to
bust his lip open. He did not possess
such a smile, so sad and small and bittersweet that it looked like heartbreak
turned flesh.
“I’m sorry,
Kyo,” he said softly, before Kyo could even recover enough to find his
breath. “I... I couldn’t...”
His facade of
easy, calm composure faltered, finally vanished.
place.
“It’s
alright,” he said gruffly, when it was anything but.
why the locked-up rat had been gone from his cage for a whole night (at the
very least; Kyo had no idea when exactly he’d disappeared, or when he’d
returned). He needed to know what in the
hell was going on.
from?
An
uncomfortable thought.
But then Yuki
smiled, just a little, just a wry, relieved upturn to the corners of his lips,
and suddenly it really was all okay
again...
For a little
while.
Part Three***