Dedicated to Charmane for the 666th review on Every Day is a Holiday.

Prompt word: burn.

Warnings: mentions of shounen-ai (Platinum Pair).

A/N: This is the first of all the request and thank you fics I've done. The title is lame, and I apologize, but I've wanted to get this to you for a while. Frog-kun, if you see this, your first one should be coming soon. Sorry for the wait and the fact that so many of these fics have yet to come. So now, without further ado, I bring you the fic.

And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable—how neither can exist without the other and how out of their grouping creativeness is born.

--John Steinbeck

Despite his cold exterior, having relations with Niou Masaharu was really like playing with fire. The boy was incredibly unpredictable, and everything about him could change at the drop of a hat. He would come to you – reach out, even – and once it wouldn't be bad, it would even be nice; but the next time it happened you would get burned, hard, your hand blistering. His icy eyes would avert your gaze, dance around you as best as possible, but when they finally connected you couldn't help but feel you had just been burned, badly.

Yet if Niou was the flame, Yagyuu was the moth, helplessly drawn to him in a way that made absolutely no sense. Despite the fact that he knew he would get burned, despite the fact that there was a very large portion of his mind constantly reminding him of the blisters and the stinging that was soon to come, Yagyuu always reached back out towards the fire, flew towards the light.

It was funny, really, that he kept going back; after all, he was the Gentleman – and gentlemen did not repeat the same thing over and over expecting different results. Gentlemen were not insane; they were the polite upper-classmen who could smooth over any business meeting with a game of golf and a witty crack about the stock market. And while Yagyuu was not yet old enough to attend business meetings, he knew quite a bit about golf and could make various witty quips about the stock market – a true gentleman indeed.

So he should have realized long ago to step back from the flame; in some sense, he already had. But every time he stepped away, cold came flooding into him as if he was standing in the middle of Hokkaido in the dead of winter. Half of his brain said to step away or he would get burned; the other half said to move in closer, or the cold would permeate him and freeze him over until his lips were a bluish purple and his blood had clotted in his veins.

Of course, if that ever happened, Yagyuu was sure the fire would be right there, creeping its way back in; there was also a part of Yagyuu that realized that, while he needed the fire, the fire needed the cool collection of Yagyuu as much, if not more, than Yagyuu needed him.

If the cool slipped away, left to its own demises it would not self destruct, simply preserve itself in time as the ice protected it.

If the fire was left alone, completely unattended, then it would spread and burn everyone around it until it had depleted its resources, its fuel long since burned away, and dwindled away completely, gone for all eternity – at least, in the sense of Niou.

For while fire would show up again, just as it had been doing for centuries, there was only one Niou Masaharu: one other half of Rikkai's doubles one, one Trickster, one best friend, one boyfriend, one first kiss, one first time.

Which was why, in the end, Yagyuu would keep sticking his hand back in the fire despite the burns; he could deal with the scars as long as he was warm enough to survive.