Author: Celeste
Rating: PG-13 for implied yaoi
Feedback: keviesprincess@netscape.net (flames welcome because they make me laugh.)
Pairing: Haru/Yuki (sort of…)
Disclaimer: Not my characters. If they were, I wouldn't waste my time writing fic about 'em. :P
Summary: Angsty one shot- Yuki's POV. My first published Fruits Basket fic. Yuki's thoughts about how it's lonely at the top…
A/N: Dedicated to Mel and Anrui, because they love Haru/Yuki and never get to see any fics. I'm trying! I am! But you've got to teach me, since I'm Kyou-obsessed.:P
Distribution: Ask and you'll probably get it.
I see Sensei's smug look of expectancy as she calls upon me to answer the question, the cool expression of someone who knows that I will answer perfectly the inquiry she has made, who knows that this one flawless boy will somehow make years of past disappointment in the educational system seem rewarding once more.
I do not fail her.
She beams at my answer, looking at me like a prized pet as she clasps her hands and tells the class that they should be very impressed with their schoolmate's intelligence.
They are impressed.
Some even applaud.
In the back of the room, Kyou snorts, loudly, derisively. There is no delicacy in anything he does.
And even as I turn to look at him with a muted form of disdain upon my face for his outburst, the animosity towards his crude behavior evaporates when I see the people around him laughing at his antics.
The boy that sits behind Kyou chuckles and reaches forward, ruffling the orange hair into an undignified mess of static and tangle. "Ne, Kyon-Kyon, you should be proud to have a cousin as smart as Sohma-kun!" the boy teases, knowing Kyou will take the bait even if they are in the middle of a lesson.
He does.
He arches his back in disgust at the notion, whirling around with electrified eyes at his tormentor. "Shut up! Why would I ever be happy that I'm related to that suck up know-it-all!?" he hisses, wild with indignation.
Several others around him laugh, unconcerned at his unthreatening riled state. More people reach over and ruffle his hair, his plethora of nicknames being called out and taken as insults as they fall upon his ears because Kyou doesn't know what an endearment is.
"Kyou, you are such a trouble-maker!" Sensei reprimands him when she notices that she doesn't have the class's undivided attention anymore. The tone of her voice is warning enough for the room to fall into complete silence once more. "Maybe if you stop talking to others and pay attention to the lessons like Yuki does, your grades will improve!"
He bristles at the condescension in her voice-- it is a tone he knows all too well, words he knows all too well-- but he for once, keeps his mouth shut, instead, he rests his chin stubbornly upon his hand and turns to gaze longingly out the window.
Some of our classmates snicker at him.
There is a look of annoyance on Sensei's face now, when she sees Kyou turn immediately to the outside world, not a moment contrite for his rudeness, and I can just hear her mutter from my seat at the front of the room, that "that boy will go nowhere."
She turns to me and the smile instantly returns to her face again. She sweetly implores me to continue on to the next question, as it is equally as difficult as the last.
I respond that I will gladly continue and begin, even as I see it in her eyes, the smugness that tells me she believes she is partially responsible for my aptitude in the classroom. Her look states her thoughts… "Yuki Sohma has been placed on the golden road to success."
I sneak a look back to Kyou, daydreaming by the window, his hair still mussed from the attention of hands from numerous individuals, a complacent look on his face as he fantasizes about sunshine and training, a cold glass of milk and a place high above the ruckus of daily life.
I look at him, and then to myself. I can see them too, you know. The separate paths that Sensei has assigned each of us to.
His is loud and disruptive, constantly bombarded by hands reaching out to grasp at him, voices full of laughter even as he shouts at them in enraged frustration to leave him alone, to let him go where he's going in peace. His path is filled with people who can't help but reach for him.
My path is perhaps less hindered, I see a clear road from point A to point B. It is open, clear, empty. There are no obstacles. The voices echoing laughter in Kyou's live in respectful silence before me, only the occasional whisper of awe in the wind as it blows by the clear landscape. My route is straight where his is convoluted, it lacks the clutter of arms and noise his does. There is silence. It is empty, and success equally empty looms at the end.
I finish my answer, and Sensei's eyes adore me.
But no one reaches out to me.
I sit down, and class resumes.
Sensei resumes speaking, and I am attentive though Kyou's soft snores from his seat beside the window begin to annoy me.
It figures he'd fall asleep.
"Ne, should we wake Kyon-Kyon up?" a boy murmurs from somewhere behind me.
"Nah, let him sleep. We can make copies of our notes for him later…not that he'll use them!"
The last part of the whispered conversation is snickered, but not in a malicious manner. Rather, it is one of fond teasing.
The fact that Kyou can get away with such distasteful behavior grates on me painfully.
Not because it is unseemly that someone with as respectable a name as Sohma chooses to act this way in the classroom…
…but because he is still loved for it.
They will reach out and ruffle his hair some more, even if he can't tell them the exact years in which the Sengoku Jidai took place nor the names of the generals who waged war during the Kawanakajima Battle.
They will sling arms over his shoulders and teasingly muss his hair even as he bristles at them and throws them off, hissing whatever outrageous insult first comes to his mind.
They will laugh when he asks them if they want to fight after having thrown wadded up balls of paper at the back of his head when he's daydreaming.
They will sneak their cats to school just to torment him some more, but buy him lunch afterwards in good humor.
Perhaps once in a while they will ask me to remind them whether Kousaka Danjou no suke Masanobu fought for Uesugi or Shingen, and I will have their complete attention for one minute. But once I answer, they will incline their heads slightly, respectfully, and walk away, not even pausing to contest my response.
And I can only be thankful for their respect because I have worked hard to earn it.
I take a fleeting look back at Kyou, who is still dozing comfortably in the warm afternoon sunshine and frown when I catch two of our classmates drawing the figure of a cartoon cat on the back of his wrist with a black ink pen.
They catch my eyes, and freeze for a moment, looking guiltily at me, almost as if they had been caught by Sensei herself.
"Gomen, Sohma-kun," one of them mutters, staring back down at his desk, unable to face me.
I try to smile. "It's a good drawing," I allow, a bit awkwardly. Both of them look at me oddly.
"We'll pay attention now," the boy with the pen informs me, still sounding repentant. The other nods in agreement and both return their attention to Sensei and the notes she is writing on the board.
I sigh quietly and turn around.
I am thankful for their respect.
But sometimes I wish that they would reach out and laugh with me, laugh at me, because I am right here. I wish they would try and touch me as if I were real.
I am not so high above them that they can only look and wish, as they believe.
I am here.
Just the same as Kyou is.
But all I see is their backs as they walk away…out of reach.
And I am left alone again.
I belong with no one.
I take a deep breath and continue to keep up with Sensei's notes on the board, even though I know all of this information front to back already. I am always prepared in case she throws in a small detail that I had not taken down in any of my reading notes.
"Sohma-kun?" the girl beside me whispers timidly after a moment.
I turn from my work to look at her. "Yes?"
She blushes intensely and looks at the floor, unable to hold my eyes. "My pencil broke, may I borrow one of yours?" she asks softly.
"Of course."
I am always prepared with extras.
I reach into my pencil bag and draw one out. It is long and flawlessly sharpened. The eraser has not been used once. It is perfect. I hand it to her.
She takes it very carefully from me, certain to avoid touching my hand as she takes it between thumb and forefinger by the eraser. "Thank you," she murmurs, eyes still trained on the ground, as if I am too bright a deity for human eyes to gaze upon directly without causing harm.
"You're welcome," I return, a bit disappointed that even someone in my fan club fears my touch.
No one knows that I want to be touched, that I need it as much as the next person.
Perhaps even more than that.
Black Haru had been right, that day under the bridge. When he'd cupped my chin forcefully and made me look into his eyes, I saw fire behind them, and excitement had stirred somewhere deep in my belly, a subconscious affirmation, a heady, instinctive "Yes." He knew, when no one else did, not even myself to an extent, that I desired not only to be touched, but to be possessed. I wanted someone to touch me in the messiest, most solid way…a caress I could feel, firm against my face like his hand had been against my cheek at that moment.
Because it closed the distance.
Because it meant that someone wanted to reach out to me….
…that someone would transcend the idol worship that had kept me fenced off from everyone else, a world away, because they believed I was too special, too precious, too much better than them to reach out to.
He forced me to look into his eyes that day.
And even though I played it off, used that familiar tone of disdain and cold superiority to dismiss his intentions, I felt it.
It was good to feel.
To feel that I belonged to someone.
Sometimes I want so much to feel that again that I fantasize about grabbing Haru out of nowhere and kissing the dull look of easy complacence from his face, to poke and prod the sparks back to life, to use my lips and teeth and tongue to stoke the warm embers lying dormant and useless into the burning fire I see whenever his black side comes to claim me.
Because I want to be possessed…touched like I belong to someone, as if I am close to someone. I am tired of being trapped in some glass display case as others look on from afar in awe and near-worship even as they are never permitted to cross certain barriers for a closer look.
But Black Haru lacks any of that delicacy, lacks a notion for boundaries that keep me from him. His touch is firm, unyielding, unafraid. It is madly domineering, strangely electric.
There is an ironic freedom in being possessed so fully…as if the fire in his eyes burns something from me, cuts me loose of my self-made prison. His is not only a touch, it is a declaration of belonging, of solid human contact to come, forever and ever.
When he is white, he is gentle and patient. He is kind. He looks upon me with a warm, saccharine-sweet adoration that makes me feel absolutely vile inside because that expression just seems to put him at arm's length once more.
I want to be possessed.
But even as my desires scream at me to break forth and seek satisfaction, I do not.
I cannot.
Because even as I long for that burning look of passion and possession in Haru's eye, it takes too much to bring such things forth… too many things that no one expects of me.
Even if he were to look at me like that always, I do not know how others will look in turn.
Even if he were to grab hold and kiss me back, to throw caution to the wind with me, to allow desire and passion to overcome rational thinking as he looks upon me with fierce intensity, I know that everyone else will look upon my actions with disgust, surprise, disappointment.
And I could not weather that, no matter how Haru touched me…even if he was to be the only one who would ever reach out to me like that ever.
To risk being touched in a real way is to be faced with the fact that I am flawed beyond repair, flawed and broken and hiding. I would fall from a deity in their eyes to trash, a freak, something disgusting.
That is a completely different distance than the one I suffer now. Perhaps a worse one, perhaps not, but to risk it all just to see seems like far too much. From a god to garbage in one reckless scream for human contact.
And so I don't do any of those things, indulge my darker desires, because it is unseemly. Because it would mean the inevitable tearing down of everything I had worked so hard to build up. It doesn't matter that in all my building I inadvertently made a wall around myself.
But still, it whispers to me, as I sit in class, paying attention with my eyes.
I want to be possessed.
I want a touch.
"Yuki, can you tell us the name of the Uesugi retainer who faced Kousaka Danjou's contingent at Kawanakajima?"
Sensei's inquiry jolts me from my rebellious daydreaming, and I can't help but note the irony behind the fact that the first thing I fear is whether anyone saw me with my eyes glazed over. "Naoe Sanetsuna, Sensei," I say automatically.
She beams. "Very good, Yuki."
I smile back, but the praise makes me feel empty.
Behind me, they have begun drawing on Kyou's arm again.
END