Words: 2,295

Beta: Calla. And.. THEKagetsu, to a degree. Doumo arigatou, you two!

Notes: First Gravi fic. Please note that I've only read to mid-volume 6, and am following manga continuity insofar as I know it; it would be to the end of that volume if I could stop sniggering every time I look at Tatsuya and Shu-chan on that cooking show...(Which, incidentally, keeps reminding me of Iron Chef O.o)

Dedication: For Kibethan, because she's awesome and got me into Gravi in the first place. Anyway, who wouldn't want a Gravi fic dedicated to them?

Summary: With Yuki away for three weeks, how will Shuichi handle being alone? Not very well, it seems.

Disclaimer: Gravitation is the property of Maki Murakami, not me. It'd be cool to be as awesome as Murakami-sensei though...

Missing You

Shuichi barreled through the door of the apartment, already calling out his normal greeting-slash-warning of "Yuki! I'm home!" before he stopped abruptly in the process of kicking his shoes off.

That's right, he remembered, shoulders slumping as he finished removing his shoes at a much less supersonic speed. Yuki's on a promo tour..

He pouted at the wall, mentally whining about how unfair it was. He'd had a hard day at the studio...K-san had been angry when he was late because he hadn't slept good, Sakano-san had been spazzing for who knows what reason, Suguru had just plain been a slave driver, and Hiro didn't have any sympathy at all! Some best friend...

All he really wanted to do was have some nice Yuki snuggles, now that Yuki allowed them more often, but he couldn't because Yuki wasn't there.

Hidoi na, he sulked, dragging himself from the front hall into the kitchen, hoping there was some Pocky left over from his binge while working on lyrics a few days before.

There was. It was a single, lonesome box, slightly crushed (he guessed he might've sat on it at some point...), but it was Pocky nonetheless, so who cared? He perked up a bit, hugging the box as if it were solid gold. It wasn't quite as good as Yuki snuggles, but in the absence of Yuki, it would have to do.

He took the Pocky and a soda to the living room, where he had numerous scraps of paper scattered over the coffee table, and a lopsided, barely standing house of cards built on top of the television (he'd been trying to find some inspiration, and Sakuma-san had suggested playing with cards. He wasn't quite sure that it was what Sakuma-san had meant, precisely, but it had been fun, so...). He'd stolen the small trash can from Yuki's study - he hadn't wanted to drag the one in the kitchen into the living room, because Yuki didn't like that, and anyway Yuki never seemed to actually use the thing - and it was nestled, slightly off-kilter, next to the coffee table, full of papers in various stages of "crumpled".

With a piece of the precious snack stuck in his mouth, he cleared a small space on the low table for his soda and the oh-so-precious box of Pocky. He then plopped on the floor, nibbling slowly on the sweet, looking at his mess without really seeing it.

The lyrics weren't really due for a while yet, and normally he would be putting them off for as long as he could get away with. But he didn't really have anything else to do without Yuki around. No one to pester about eating right, or smoking, or drinking, or sleeping. No one to glomp, no one to snuggle, no one to distract from working too hard, no one to hold him while he slept even though they denied it like mad but it drove his nightmares away so they held him anyway...

He wouldn't even mind if Yuki just wanted to-- He paused, blushing at the forwardness of his thoughts. --wanted to do that with him, he wouldn't mind, really, as long as Yuki was there.

But...

Yuki wasn't.

So he was bored, and he was tired, but he didn't want to sleep because he kept having nightmares without Yuki to chase them away, so he might as well get a head start on the lyrics.

He sighed, propping his chin on one hand as he began eating another piece of Pocky as slowly as he had eaten the first one.

It just wasn't right without Yuki anymore; his day revolved around Yuki, it seemed.

Waking up to Yuki, even if Yuki wasn't there in the bed with him, he could almost always hear where Yuki was...though that was usually because Yuki was cursing at him for making a mess in the bathroom, again.

Trying to steal some of Yuki's coffee, if K-san hadn't come busting in to drag him to work, even though Yuki had forbidden him to have any, ever.

Thinking about telling Yuki everything about his day, even if Yuki wasn't paying attention, because he knew Yuki still heard him anyway.

Glomping Yuki even though Yuki was writing and had his coffee cup balanced on the arm of his chair and would be mad when it spilled all over his lap.

Begging Yuki to come watch Nittle Grasper videos with him, again, because Sakuma-san is so cool and he's singing our song!

Coaxing Yuki away from the laptop and to bed even though Yuki was approaching a deadline and really needed to continue working, but Yuki obviously needed sleep more so he ignored Yuki's foul-mouthed grumbling, because Yuki would say "thank you" in his own Yuki-like way the next morning.

It was even kinda nice when Yuki criticized his lyrics, because that meant Yuki had actually read them. Yuki probably wouldn't ever think something he had written was good, but that was okay, because that was just how Yuki was, and he didn't want Yuki to ever stop being Yuki.

He heaved a gusty sigh, dropping the piece of Pocky before it was even halfway out of the box and folding his arms on the table without regard for his papers, lowering his head to rest it on his arms.

He just downright missed Yuki so much it hurt and he wanted to cry but he wasn't going to. Really!

He sniffled. Okay, maybe he was.

But it was just so lonely without Yuki!

He scrunched his face up and scrubbed a fist over his eyes, dashing away the tears that seemed determined to break free. Yuki would tell him he was a crybaby, ignore him for a bit...and then ask what the hell he was crying for, anyway. Then maybe Yuki would scoff, or ruffle his hair, and tell him to "stop crying, brat."

With another sniffle that he stubbornly told himself would not lead to more tears, he pulled a pen and a scrap of paper closer to himself and began trying to work out some lyrics.

Maybe that would keep him from crying over Yuki being gone...

Yuki scowled as he trudged up the stairs to his apartment, severely displeased with the fact that the elevator was out of service. If he hadn't thought it was impossible for even Shuichi to cause that much chaos, he'd have blamed the little brat.

As it stood, all he wanted to do was get home, ditch his luggage, and go to sleep. The bullet train was not a comfortable place to sleep for anyone, still less so for him; he'd never understood how anyone could sleep in any sort of public transportation. (The brat didn't count. He'd never understand the idiot anyway, so it didn't really bother him when the brat did yet another inexplicable thing.)

He should still have been on tour for a few more days, but the last few days never really mattered very much, so he'd decided to return home early. Three weeks was a ridiculous amount of time to devote to promoting a book that was already flying off the shelves faster than the stores could keep up with. He'd lost interest in it the moment the last word had been typed, anyway, so he was going to ignore Mizuki if she started harping on him about "abandoning his obligations."

He didn't have to keep writing, after all. His contracts were always for a set number of scripts per year, and thanks to Mizuki's harassing, he usually wrote more than he was required to. He could stop whenever he wanted to, and never lack for money. He might get bored, though.

Of course, ever since Shuichi had moved in, his writing had started to fall more into the contracted pace than the demonic one Mizuki had set and he had been willing enough to meet. The brat was distracting just by breathing in the same apartment as him.

On the other hand, as long as the brat hung around, he was very unlikely to ever become bored, whether or not he had anything else to occupy himself with.

His scowl deepened as he switched his suitcase to his left hand, rooting around in his coat pocket for his key with the other.

It still annoyed him how quickly the brat had become deeply entrenched in his life. And yet... it might be annoying as hell to be glomped at superhuman speeds, but it now constituted as normal, something to expect every day. Shuichi had become normal, something-- someone to expect. Somehow, it wasn't as bad as he had once feared it being.

And, well, he was nothing if not a creature of habit.

He unlocked the door - and oh what a trial it had been, teaching the brat to lock it when Yuki wasn't there, regardless of whether the brat himself was or not - entered, and kicked it shut behind himself, negligently dropping the suitcase and immediately reaching for a cigarette. Ah, nicotine.

He toed his shoes off, shrugged out of his coat, and padded into the living room with the intent of hitting the shower and then bed. He stopped short only a few steps into the room, jaw dropping just enough for his cigarette to be in danger of falling.

What the hell had the brat done to his living room?!

It was an absolute mess. Paper, blank, scribbled on, and crumpled, was haphazardly scattered over the entire room, though it was centered around the coffee table. There was a pile of empty Pocky boxes on the couch, and he was pretty sure that there was a tower of pop cans peeking out from behind it. On top of the television was what he presumed was meant to be a house of cards - it didn't look much like one, but the brat never could do anything normally.

Curled up in the middle of the mess was the brat himself, hugging one of the couch's accent pillows to his midriff, apparently fast asleep.

He scowled, stalking over to the brat, intending to wake him and make the brat clean up the damn mess.

But up close he noticed the messier-than-normal hair, the almost-full Pocky box still resting on the table, the death grip on the pillow, the moue of distress on a normally-smiling face, and the dried tear tracks on soft cheeks.

Hell, he thought, angry scowl mutating slightly to a vaguely worried frown. Almost distractedly, he stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the side table, kicked aside a tower of paper - that turned out to be his trash can; there would be words about that, later - and knelt next to the brat's head.

For a moment, he was tempted to run his hands through the brat's thick, dark hair, and wake him gently. Then the urge passed - helped, perhaps, by glancing at the wreck the brat had made of his living room - and he snatched the pillow from the brat's grasp and smacked him over the head with it.

The brat's reaction was amusing - he jerked back against the coffee table's legs, shrieked some bit of gibberish that Yuki couldn't understand (it would probably hurt his brain to try to understand it, anyway), and sat bolt upright, violet eyes wide with shock.

Said eyes snapped to him when he snorted, far more amused by it than, perhaps, he should have been.

"Yuki?!" the brat gibbered incredulously.

"What the hell did you do to my living room, brat?" he asked in reply, eyebrows swiftly drawing down into a scowl.

"Yuki!" the brat repeated, and launched himself at Yuki with all the force of a missile. "You're home! Yuki's home! Welcome home, Yuki! I missed you sooo much and I love you and--"

"And you're going to clean up the damn mess you made, right?" he cut in, expertly maneuvering around the dark-haired leech clinging to him for another cigarette, though he made no move to push the brat off.

Yet.

The brat just rubbed his cheek against his chest and clung harder, if at all possible. "I'm not letting Yuki go ever ever ever again because I miss Yuki too much when he's gone and I can't sleep good without Yuki there because Yuki makes me feel safe so I've been having nightmares without Yuki here and K-san's been annoyed 'cause I keep being late to the studio but it's not my fault, not really, but there's a new hole in the bedroom wall, just so you know--" the brat paused and he wondered if he was finished. No such luck, apparently, because the brat took a deep breath and continued, "--so please don't be mad, Yuki!"

Then the brat sighed, and shifted so he was leaning fully against Yuki, slender arms wrapped around his neck, and added, much more softly, "I really, really missed Yuki..." It was punctuated with a tiny sniffle.

Yuki looked down at the head nestled so trustingly against his chest, and mentally swore at himself for becoming soft. He took a final drag off his cigarette and then snuffed out his second half-smoked cigarette since he'd walked in the door.

"You're still cleaning up your damn mess, brat." When the brat tried to pull away, apparently to do just that, he added blithely, "In the morning. I'm too damn tired to deal with your fucking noise."

The brat looked up at him, blinked, and then smiled and snuggled back against him with a quiet cheer of, "Yuki loves me!"

"Damn brat..." he sighed.

But he didn't push Shuichi away, and that was more telling than anything he ever could have said.

Owari