A/N: Written for
GX bingo – the non-flash version, #103 – Fujiwara Yuusuke
Diversity Writing Challenge, b31 – write your OT3
The title "Evidence Base" is twofold. Part of it is simply because we're constantly told in medicine to treat (in theory, since we're still students :D) as per the evidence base, ie. what's proven to be effective through clinical trials and previous medical practices. So a solution per evidence base is a solution that has evidence backing it up. The other reason is a play on the word base in terms of relationships. You'll see why in the fic.
Enjoy!
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Evidence Base
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Everyone said they were the best of friends before it all fell apart, but they were wrong. They were both less and more.
They were less because friends trusted each other, didn't they? Friends told each other things and as much as they hung out together, they talked very little about themselves to each other. Yuusuke knew that Ryou had a little brother, that Fubuki had a little sister, that he was a scaredy-cat and she was as tough as nails and both of them had a strange stubbornness to them that hopefully growing up will cure. And they both knew he had none.
He didn't tell them, though, that he had no parents either, that they were dead. He didn't tell them that it was the house staff that had raised him thereafter: the maid and the cook who were always too distant and too formal to be replacement parents, but gave him everything else he could need. They maintained the house, cooked him three meals a day and occasionally did little things like pick up a booster pack for him or out a vase of flowers on the table to break the monotone. Little things he was lucky to have, in a world where his family was long gone.
And now Ryou and Fubuki were like that, close but distant and adding to the décor of his dorm room. They had single rooms in Obelisk, but there was that little guitar-shaped charm of Fubuki's and the sash from the dojo Ryou had attended before Duel Academia. And he knew his notes from Professor Daitokuji's class were sitting on Fubuki's desk, and there was a drawing of Cyber End Dragon pinned to Ryou's cork board, right under the picture that featured all three of them together…
He had that picture on his board as well. And so many others of the three of them. And drawings of Honest: Honest playing with him, Honest embracing him, Honest being there – the constant that never faded away into the background like his shadow…
At the beginning, it had only been him and Honest, and what few photos of him and his parents he could bear to display. But then Ryou and Fubuki had crawled into his life, and his room, and crowded both. Friends in that they pushed, but only pushed so far and knew when to stop. Not friends in that there was so much more depth between them to explore.
What did that mean? Did he want to know them more? Did he want to spill it all: the secrets he kept close to his chest, and the black that bubbled within? Did he want to let loose those obsessions he carefully hid from view: the occult books, the tracings, the things only Honest bore witness too and begged him to stop, stop or say something and that was part of what was stopping him, because he couldn't stop and maybe that meant he couldn't say it either –
And saying it would mean admitting his parents' death, his parents' non-existence and it was easier for them to not exist when they existed only in a few photos, surrounded by others who were still there and surrounding him but it was an uncertain existence with them as well, when they pushed just far enough and no further and maybe it was a better idea to have their hooks deep in his skin so he couldn't yank them back out because he could, right now he could, let them go –
No he couldn't. Those hooks were already there, in his heart, and there was no evidence base for it.